71–80 of 90 posts
- How many of those users convert to cash in the bank and recurring customers?
- Has this actually resulted in a better ROI than other means?
- Does this sort of semi-solicited tweet advertising gain or lose goodwill?
From a tech standpoint, this is cool, from a business standpoint, it's not proven yet from this writeup. IMO.
I know a few people who worked on a startup doing exactly this some 2-3 years ago.
Problem was it would not really scale plus Twitter really limited the free pipe.
There were a lot of hotels interested, but not enough to pay.
Am wondering if there are an API based services which can be used for NLP? Something cheap because the number of messages to be processed will be extremely large.
https://www.mashape.com/jetlore-dev/semantic-text-processing...
Demo:
http://dev.jetlore.com/tech-demo/text-processing-api/entity-...
Disclosure: I used to work for Jetlore.
"Creating serial or bulk accounts with overlapping use, however, is prohibited."
I initially thought you were using your company's own Twitter account for messaging people; instead, by your own admission [2], you have resorted to using multiple 'realistic' accounts:
https://twitter.com/search?q=outpost.travel
This kind of growth hacking is misleading and unethical, and I think it has no place in Hacker News.
[1] https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/to...
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…
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.
All he's doing is smartly parsing the results of Twitter searches. This isn't really groundbreaking, it just requires some legwork.
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…
The problem is that Twitter's filtered Streaming API has quite a small limit on the number of words that you can provide to match tweets. So, it would be impossible to scale. A better option might be retrieving tweets from the Firehose Streaming API, but one would need a massive backend to handle it. Additionally, access has to be requested to Twitter and it's very rarely granted. Alternatively, Datasift or Gnip can…
Edit: We're also banning the site of the startup this was promoting, since it has been promoted abusively on HN in the past and asking for that to stop [1] seems only to have encouraged more.
The idea of directly engaging potential users actively seeking/asking for a particular product/service on Twitter is very interesting; but unfortunately the way you are implementing it right now is unethical and in violation of Twitter's Automation Rules and Best Practices [1]: "Creating serial or bulk accounts with overlapping use, however, is prohibited." I initially thought you were using your company's own Twitte…
There has also been a post about Darkmarket (https://github.com/darkwallet/darkmarket) on HN. Again, I do not encourage trading illegal goods at all but as a proof of concept it is still impressive.