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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

#41

Post by dirktheman »

trevorstarick wrote: post #27
pidg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, this is a big no-no. If you're answering someone who posted a question and it's clear that you're the business behind the product/answer that's okay with me. But if you're using a personal profile (real? fake?) to push traffic to your website, you're actively misleading people.

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

#42

Post by trevorstarick »

uptown wrote: post #39

Great innovative lead-gen. I'm more curious about your database of destinations. Do you have formal partnerships with the sites you're linking-to to syndicate their listings?

We do. For most for most of the providers we have arrangements that give us commission but they're all providing us with an API or data dump of some sort.

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

#44

Post by wpietri »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #16
mikkom wrote: post #10

"How I'm spamming Twitter to acquire 100 uniques in a day"

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 because it's profitable for them, that's spam too.

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

#45

Post by bernatfp »

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…

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 be better sources for the firehose, but I think they only provide a fraction (like 1/10) of the real amount of tweets that go through the actual firehose.

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

#46

Post by wpietri »

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?

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

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

#48

Post by givehimagun »

rbobby wrote: post #47

I wonder if they are using paid interns or unpaid interns? Makes me wonder if the cost of paid interns was put towards regular advertising whether it would generate a better return.

Unpaid interns would be a violation of labor laws if you're simply not paying them for work you would normally pay for.
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