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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

techaddict009 wrote: post #32
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…

Asking out of curiosity Is it legal to automate tweet in twitter? I mean if twitter detects someone is doing so wont they ban them? Edit: I Read the post properly the replies are manual not automatic so I don't twitter will have any issue with it.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by Nogwater »

mikkom wrote: post #20
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

I think the question is, how spammy would you think if 1000 other people would do the same? How relevant would the answers be if every answer would have 100s of answers from bots that are advertising their service?

I agree with the sentiment that this is borderline unethical, but I think that it's probably okay as long as there's a human in the loop presumably spending as much time/effort verifying the usefulness of the tweet before sending it as it costs the end user to read the tweet and decide if it's worthwhile.

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

#54

Post by Nogwater »

trevorstarick wrote: post #21
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.

If there isn't that much traffic between 3am and 9am, then why is it worth it to spam during those hours?

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

#55

Post by bengali3 »

wpietri wrote: post #44
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

That's ridiculous. People often write about making web stuff here. And their email addresses are often easy to find. Does that mean that we're all asking for outsourcing firms to send us "manual, personal" form emails via a 99.8% automated process, even if a marketroid blesses each one? Of course not. That's spam. Similarly, if I post a question on Twitter, I'm asking my followers. If some random jackass butts in bec…

There's a difference between holding up a 1x1 foot sign at a gathering of friends and planting a 1x1 foot sign on your lawn.

Are you expecting your tweets to be private or public?

If you publicly announce a problem, (and asking for public comments back.. ) then it is not spam if you get a relevant and appropriate message sent to you.

Scaping usernames here however is not comparable to the blog post's example

edit: misrepresentation as 'just another follower' is what i am against here.

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

#56

Post by jaredsohn »

shankysingh wrote: post #23
trevorstarick wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Also a YC startup called InboxQ just shows you the questions to let you manually respond.

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

#58

Post by gk1 »

phpnode wrote: post #40
imjared wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All he's doing is smartly parsing the results of Twitter searches. This isn't really groundbreaking, it just requires some legwork.

I agree, but the general point is that specific marketing tricks that work well should be hoarded, not shared, because sharing them destroys their value.

> "because sharing them destroys their value."

... Why?

Because it'll lower your competitive advantage? If your main competitive advantage is knowing about some cheap Twitter trick--sorry, I mean "Growth Hack"--then you need to rethink your game plan.

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

#59

Post by mhp »

This post is doing something a bit different and probably more useful, but it reminds me of the people that search Twitter for mentions of their competitors and then try to convince those people to use their product instead. I see this every once in awhile when I search for our product mentions and it makes me sad. I'm sad because it's a huge waste of time for them and they are actually damaging their brand (not ours).

Even though Twitter is public, there's still a sense that some random person isn't just going to start replying to your tweets.

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

#60

Post by knewter »

wpietri wrote: post #46
mikkom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is, how spammy would you think if 1000 other people would do the same? How relevant would the answers be if every answer would have 100s of answers from bots that are advertising their service?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. "What if everybody did that?" is a great framework for considering the effects of novel behaviors.

literally is just Kantian ethics
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