I run a bot that posts Street Art pictures from Instagram [1]. The bot dominates the hashtag search term results [2]. People who find the bot, click the profile and click the URL associated with an app I made for discovering street art [3].
The bot dominates search results because it finds hashtag heavy images via Instagram. The hashtags on the Instagram image carry over to the Twitter post, resulting in an active searchable Twitter feed. The bot posts a over a thousand times a day.
Since releasing the app, I've averaged about 500 downloads per month, without any promotion. It works very well for consistent passive traffic.
They obviously don't care about lots of types of traffic.
If you watch some technology related keyword with search, anytime some stories from that keyword hit the tech blogs, you get a spam storm of hundreds or thousands of identical, useless tweets linking the post. I guess I'm being presumptuous, but that looks like they aren't doing anything at all to limit activity like that.
Twitter is a publicly traded company and one of their metrics is tweets per day. Spam is in their best interest. Same goes for snapchat. It's a bit twisted but when snapchat or Twitter can say "X million photos/messages per day," who cares if it's all spam? Who's gonna prove them wrong?
I see. Do you post street art from Instagram because that's just what IFTTT can work with? I have tried Zapier automation service to repost from my Tumblr blog to social network groups. Not sure if it attracted anyone.
"You'll need to download the code from Github, create a Twitter application, register a free account with AYLIEN, generate an app specific password for your Google account if you're using 2 Factor Authentication, make a copy of this spreadsheet in your Google Drive, and update the constants in the code. The whole process won't take more than 5 minutes!"
Thanks! Next problem: can't add a phone to my twitter account; like this: https://twittercommunity.com/t/cannot-add-phone-number-to-tw...
I've created a ticket with support and it says they "usually reply within few days". Is there a way to set myself up faster?
If more people do this then I'll just stop asking for recommendations on Twitter.
When I do ask, it's because I want responses from the people I follow (and that follow me) - trusted contacts whose opinions I am interested in. I don't want to opt in to a brand new spam feed every time I tweet.
If I write "I'm finding $productA obnoxious because of $foo; any suggestions for a replacement?", and I get an automated tweet about $productB that shows no signs of actually solving my problem, then yeah, that's spam.
On the other hand, if I got a human reading my tweet (whether they found it automatically or not) and responding with "You might try our $productB; we've solved $foo by doing ...; see $url", then I wouldn't mind seeing that, because they've actually offered me a solution to the exact problem I was complaining about.
^to take that a step further, the marketer shouldn't respond with "try product X", but with further inquiry into the nature of the problem! I've initiated contact with people that way and subsequently built lasting relationships with them.
I totally agree and I'll just do the same thing. Seriously, doing things like this is destroying a communications platform for your own short-term gain. This is very much antisocial behaviour.
"Trying to have a private conversation with friends? Have some advertising shoved in your face! Don't like it? GTFO!"
No wonder Twitter is dying.
Anyway, I don't use Twitter much anymore, but have to agree with the OP. If I wanted the opinion of random strangers, I wouldn't go to Twitter, I'd just Google it.
"Someone" didn't send a pointer to a "possible solution", a business sent me an ad. When I ask something like that I want unbiased opinions, the example here would not be one.
No, businesses care far more about tricking you into giving them as much money as possible for something. It's you who needs to look around and see the real world. Very rare is a business that offers you the best option for you. And such business usually doesn't even need to do tricks to "generate leads".
Also, if you want the opinion of your "trusted contacts" - TALK to them. That's not what Twitter is for. If you posted your question publicly, people assume you would appreciate an answer.
Twitter is one of those environments where there isn't a public/private binary - much like interacting with people in real life. If I'm sat at a bar talking to friends, there are some situations in which the intervention of a stranger would be appreciated, but it's few and far between. And if they're a salesperson? Forget it.
I think a lot of the hate in the comments is around the title. If it had been "How to get actionable leads using AYLIEN", it might have been better received. As is, it seems click-baity. It's 50 lines of code, using a third party service (which is fine, but should be titled as such).
This is interesting. It seems like a very simplified version of what Socedo (http://www.socedo.com/) is trying to do.
They are generating actionable sales leads primarily for enterprise business. But I used the trial just as an individual, and that was also sort of fun and more useful than I would've expected!
Another one that I only know about because a relative of mine works there is http://kitewheel.com/ . I think it's designed and priced for large corporations, though.
Marketing guy here who's passionate about real conversations. Just want to remind everybody– tools, tricks and tactics should help you remove the tedious "bookkeeping" aspects of your marketing/sales job, but PLEASE, PLEASE engage people as human beings.
Spamming people with stock messages is polluting the communal pool, and everyone suffers for it. When you find someone with purchasing intent, TALK to them. Ask questions. You don't need to punch everyone in the face with your sales pitch.
I couldn't agree more. Sending out automated sales pitches is spamming people and that's the main reason I didn't add auto-reply feature in the code. I go through the tweets that get added to the spreadsheet and try to engage the ones who might actually benefit from using our product with my personal twitter account.
The tool is here to help you find the people who might be interested in your product easier (look through 30 tweets instead of 100s). It's not supposed to/should not be doing the actual sales pitch automatically.
Kudos on building something cool to solve a pain point, but unsure about the efficacy of this implementation. A list of negative-sentiment tweets about competitor products is certainly a good place to start, but is by no means a list of actionable leads. Still requires quite a bit of human interaction to figure out which tweets are actually solid leads, and is only truly useful if your competitors have only one product.
You also miss out on users asking for suggestions who aren't currently using a competitor product (which IMO is a more valuable segment).
A more interesting implementation is one that takes context into account, but that would require some homemade ML work and likely outside of the scope of quick & hacky solutions.
Yep, I agree that this is not a perfect solution, but it worked for us.
I'd mentioned in the blog post that out of 34 tweets that were added to the spreadsheet, only 6 of them were solid leads. But going through 34 tweets to find those 6 is a lot easier than going through hundreds of them over 8 hours.
Agreed. I think generating a more filtered list is possible - but would take significantly more time than it took to build the sentiment analysis tool.
The results of the more-filtered-list-tool would be quite interesting, though, as you'd essentially be modeling a set of "ideal leads" and determining how close/far a set of tweets are to those models. Just figuring out an "ideal lead" model for the segments you're targeting would be an interesting intellectual pursuit.
I have a half-baked contextual analysis implementation which I could probably spin into a high-volume twitter analysis tool. Was doing NLP analysis on unstructured data (like news articles) and extracting topics + extrapolating commonalities between sets. Could be used to pick up topics from tweets and determine if two unrelated tweets are actually talking about the same thing (without necessarily replicating the same syntax).
I'm working on a tool called Socedo (http://www.socedo.com/) which is essentially solving this problem for businesses. We're generating leads from Twitter based on what people Tweet & who they follow. The best part is we make these leads easy to consume at scale by setting up an automated engagement workflow.
Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for a more complete Social lead gen solution + no code!
I didn't know about tweetboss, but they all cost something around $50-100/mo. Although it seems like tweetboss is a desktop app with $47 for lifetime license?!
This does not give you people who are talking about your own product. It gives you people who are already using your competitor's products but are looking to switch to something like your product.
I run a bot that posts Street Art pictures from Instagram [1]. The bot dominates the hashtag search term results [2]. People who find the bot, click the profile and click the URL associated with an app I made for discovering street art [3].
The bot dominates search results because it finds hashtag heavy images via Instagram. The hashtags on the Instagram image carry over to the Twitter post, resulting in an active searchable Twitter feed. The bot posts a over a thousand times a day.
Since releasing the app, I've averaged about 500 downloads per month, without any promotion. It works very well for consistent passive traffic.
[1]: Bot http://twitter.com/publicartfound
[2]: Search term https://twitter.com/search?q=streetart
[3]: Landing page http://publicart.io