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How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

trevorstarick.com

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Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#21

Post by trevorstarick »

chippy wrote: post #19

The thing to remember here is that the replies are being crafted by a human. It's a very sensible thing to do. If you were to use the same procedure but send the replies off using a bot and the API, then I believe that it would be against the Twitter ToS.

It was what I originally was planning on doing but felt that a personal response would be better than a bot. During the hours of 3am - 9am I do set it up to be auto replies but there's not much traffic anyways. There are similar Twitter bots that do this and I've spoken to someone from Twitter about a grey of the ToS area I might be able to work in.

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#23

Post by shankysingh »

trevorstarick wrote: post #15
vidarh wrote: post #8

Have you considered what potential there is for scaling in up? Because if all you are getting that way is 100 uniques a day, the effort involved sounds like it'd make it a net loss compared to simply buying the traffic via paid advertising. If the tweets continue to generate additional referrals down the line, then of course it might change. But frankly, having seen the travel space up close, I find this system more…

It's something I've thought about and both our current investors and potential future investors have mentioned that this could be a product on its own. If I were to scale it up and turn it into its own startup I'd want to make sure not to saturate the tweetosphere with it or there's no benefit over the competition. I'd also probably license it out to early stage startups instead of bigger companies because no one wan…

A similar product exists : http://launch.c4chq.com/

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#24

Post by pidg »

trevorstarick wrote: post #18
shawabawa3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you post a question on twitter you can hardly call it spam if someone answers it, even if it's with their own product

A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.

If this is the tweet you blanked out in the article: https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464740467213496320

I'm interested in how that works. Is it a realistic-looking spam account you can hire? (Not judging - genuinely interested.)

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#25

Post by Theodores »

The amount of startup-culture Kool Aid going on here is quite mesmerising.

First the product, 'let's aggregate the aggregators!!!'

The monetization: those affiliate marketing codes everyone else uses!!!

Then there is the user acquisition strategy. Getting some intern to post stuff to Twitter for you.

The spin off product: a Twitter spamming machine!

Then there is 'sharing economy'. Is this really all it amounts to?

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#26

Post by [deleted] »

pidg wrote: post #24
trevorstarick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.

If this is the tweet you blanked out in the article: https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464740467213496320 I'm interested in how that works. Is it a realistic-looking spam account you can hire? (Not judging - genuinely interested.)

[deleted]

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#27

Post by trevorstarick »

pidg wrote: post #24
trevorstarick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A question of ethics. I could have written it to be as flexible with its replies as possible but I didn't want it to look like spam. Even now the odd tweet gets passed but it occasionally makes for a laugh as the replies I'm giving make no sense based on the question.

If this is the tweet you blanked out in the article: https://twitter.com/DeasesRuthann/status/464740467213496320 I'm interested in how that works. Is it a realistic-looking spam account you can hire? (Not judging - genuinely interested.)

We have a few realistic accounts which we maintain. During office hours we manually reply to the tweets but we can't, unfortunately, be up 24/7.

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#28

Post by untog »

Theodores wrote: post #25

The amount of startup-culture Kool Aid going on here is quite mesmerising. First the product, 'let's aggregate the aggregators!!!' The monetization: those affiliate marketing codes everyone else uses!!! Then there is the user acquisition strategy. Getting some intern to post stuff to Twitter for you. The spin off product: a Twitter spamming machine! Then there is 'sharing economy'. Is this really all it amounts to?

Hacker News is so much more honest at this time of day, before Silicon Valley wakes up.

It'll never last, they're going to disrupt us any second now.

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#29

Post by phpnode »

If this trick is still really working for you, please, do yourself a favour and shut up about it. Drawing attention to it is not going to end well for you, either twitter shuts you down or people just copy your idea and it loses effectiveness. The correct time to write about these things is when they stop working.

Re: How I'm using Twitter to acquire 100 uniques a day for my startup

#30

Post by waterside81 »

trevorstarick wrote: post #2

I'm planning on doing a more in-depth write up on how NER/NLP in the tweetosphere is different that general NER/NLP which will by me technical explanation of what I did here. That should be up sometime later this week.

Check out our API for your NER needs, we cover quite a large corpus of people, places & things. Might be able to broaden your scope: https://www.repustate.com/semantic/
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