Your competitors Twitter followers = your next contact list | Hacker News Reader

Your competitors Twitter followers = your next contact list

13.7billionyearslater.net

59 pointschunkyslink26 comments

Words can barely express how much I love being spammed by competitors of a company I like enough to follow on Twitter. I'll certainly rush to give them a try, not hit them block button and mentally file them under 'wilfully does not understand Internet etiquette, arrogant assholes happy to waste strangers time to hawk their crap'.

It's good information, if used correctly.

Just spamming them is the wrong approach. However, you can pull these records into your own DB and then use this as a lookup table (for example: when people sign up to contact them directly to close the sale).

Probably some other creative uses as well. As long as it avoids spamming everyone at once.

does twitter offer an email->twitter handle lookup API?

They used to. Probably they removed it to prevent this very case.

Here's the related issue #: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=353

You can use third party service that provides you with social media information associated to an email address. Rapleaf and FlowTown are two such services.

I can understand what you are saying and I somewhat agree.

However, are you naive enough to think that just because your emotions run so high on this issue, that someone might still offer a much better product than you already have or that just because they are using Twitter to contact you, that they might actually have something useful to say ?

The much better approach would be to find about 5-10 competitors on Twitter and take the intersect of all their followers. Those are people that actually care about your market.

I saw an app on App Engine out there that did this, and I've considered for a long time trying to make a business out of tools like this to analyze competitor's usage of social media to attempt to find decent leads.

So this guy is openly declaring his intent to spam a bunch of people.

Honestly, good luck with that. Twitter has a lot of measures in place to prevent people from abusing this sort of thing. For example, you can't just auto add 10,000 people (you technically can, but Twitter will ban you).

Well, yes, but this is still quite interesting (imho).

In the old days, the competitor had an email list. You couldn't know how many or who were subscribed. In a twitter world, it's all out in the open.

It would probably be a mistake for him to actually use twitter to contact these people. But I can imagine for corporate customers this will tell you which companies will be more amenable to a cold call by telephone.

Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad idea.

However, you can quickly target people who evangelize your competitors by tracking which of those followers who re-tweet and follow competitors on other social networks.

Those are really the users that you want. Identify them and give them a reason to get behind you.

Mass following any group of people on any social network won't increase your reach. Targeting specific groups of users, identifying what they want and giving that to them will.

to do this, try:

- going to http://twitya.com

- enter competitor's twitter account, hit return

- see which users are replying or mentioning the competitor

- enter into a conversation with each one

- if they won't use or try your product, they might at least follow you if you give good reason, and are courteous.

- also see the friends of the competitor that you can follow too

- read the competitor's tweets

Or just build your own. It's super easy with the API's and can be customized with much better search-and-match rules than anything out in the wild.

Some of my personal favorite stats are to watch people who RT more than once over a set time period about the competition.

"Like terms" is also handy because then you can add terms that are directly related but not identical to your competitor.

I'm sure that the big brand folks are already doing this and that there are paid tools ... but on a smaller scale, it's fast and easy to whip this sort of monitoring up.

The hard part is figuring out what these people want. You really need to have an insight into the weaknesses of your competition to accomplish that.

I mentioned Twitya cos I built it :) What you mention sounds great, and you could also run some twitter searches and subscribe to their feeds. The Twitter ecosystem is so rich, and there'd be crossover involved between different apps, and apps are being improved and new ones released continuously, with this itself a big problem.

"Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad idea."

Good idea. You can get this information from the (un)follow feed from http://rssfriends.com (here you're also getting users unfollowing, which can be noise, although I think there's an unlisted feed that doesn't show this.)

You can also get another feed of those an account starts to follow.

Beyond the spam issue, the twitter follower list isn't a very accurate list of people with genuine interest in a person or topic anymore. There are so many people and bots and who simply follow in the quest for reciprocation or at the behest of the twitter suggestion engine without genuine interest

I would target people who are not completely satisfied with the competitor's product. If I see people tweeting competitors asking for feature X, where my product already has X, I will send them a message.

When I saw the word "clickbank" this post suddenly made a lot more sense..

It's the right idea, just waaay too simplistic. Twitter is very useful for finding people who may fit your target audience, but it's not a spam and split deal – you need to build up value in your own Twitter acct. to get people interested. Spam is spam, even on Twitter.

The idea should not be mass spam. But you can always try to see who are the influencers in that list and then contact them through email personally asking to beta test your service and be early adopters. There is nothing wrong with this approach.

It's easy to build a mailing list by using Twitter properly. I know one example of a 60,000+ email list built from a single Twitter account in around two years (2007-2009).

Messaging those who follow a competitor is just the smallest fraction of the techniques available for using Twitter for business, and one of the least effective. It doesn't scale well, for example. Also, by analyzing data across multiple social networks, a much wider variety of effective, non-spammy marketing possibilities emerge.

I don't think having 10000 followers on twitter means much in terms of numbers, because lot of people just play the "you follow-I follow" game there. But there is a good chance of finding some 100 odd genuinely interested followers who sooner or later might use the service. So, although it sounds like spam but not a bad idea at all.

"Earn money by selling your documents, ebooks, music and photography."

That's a stupid idea. First, are they your documents (that is you own them)? For photos, music, ebook... there are already dedicated services working on that. I mean "dedicated". I don't think that a general one will beat them in term of features, support and promotion.

Other things, like Music or Documents. First, you may not own them, so it'll be illegal selling them. Second, if you do, who will sell their private documents and who's the heck will buy them???

Don't like to read articles much? Take a look at clickbank.com.

They seem to be doing alright with a "stupid idea".

Clickbank is a cesspool of spam and garbage.

Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing!

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