Show HN: FreshPost.io – Automated Social Media Marketing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FreshPost.io – Automated Social Media Marketing

freshpost.io

39 pointsholoiii33 comments

Founder of ContentDJ (http://a.contentdj.com/1nrbICq) here.

I am curious to see how you guys decided to go after this space. For me, I started ContentDJ through an attempt at growth hacking on Twitter. Through a script I developed back in 2011, I was able to retweet trending content and grow my followers by about 1K per month. It turned into a viable growth channel for the startup I was working on at the time. So, I made the pivot and build ContentDJ (http://a.contentdj.com/1nrbICq).

As an interesting anecdote, last year, two product managers from Buddy Media signed up. Through Mixpanel, I found that they were particularly interested in my social media editorial calendar feature (http://a.contentdj.com/1lOiRWD). Surely enough, just last month, Salesforce announced their Marketing Cloud with a very similar content calendar in it. Unfortunately we now live in a world where multi-billion dollar public company steals from a one-man bootstrapped startup...

Utility patents are your friend.

A bit of a leap to assume it was blatantly stolen. It's entirely possible that this feature was on the roadmap long before they discovered ContentDJ. Sure, big companies may get ideas from startup products, but of course the reverse happens all the time too and both feel like fair game to me.

Don't overpersonalize things, dude.

Nothing gets my personal brand going like interacting with companies who can't be bothered to have a human being write some words at me.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Chirpsy: http://chirpsy.com

We've been around for 2 and a half years in this space. We do something very similar, but we have our own twist on it.

Just like FreshPost.io and Beatrix, we scour the internet for the latest news and blog posts based on your keywords. However, unlike those offerings, we go the extra mile and actually manually evaluate the content against your specific social media writing guidelines and we then draft a post for you to approve.

We're more like your own human social media assistant and ghostwriter. We're also more expensive, but you get what you pay for.

Over the years we have found that many of our customers really just want someone to handle it all directly, so we've recently started offering social media management services in a more traditional capacity.

Ultimately, It's nice to see more competition in this space.

FreshPost.io - your site looks great, although I don't see a link to your Facebook so I can evaluate how good your content is? Any links to see real results?

What is the point of creating a twitter account if you're just going to use an algorithm to choose your tweets. This is just spam in my book, and the value of this will go down as more people use it.

I think there's definitely an optimal medium between:

1) Fully automated (Bad)

2) Fully manually managed (Time consuming)

That's what we believe at http://beatrixapp.com and we designed our workflow with human participation in mind. In other words our job is to show you great ideas for content - which you then approve or tweak. And not just "auto posting" things endlessly.

We did start off with an "autopilot" feature, but soon realized that although there is demand for such a thing, it's not really a part of the industry we want to participate in. We want to be known as a way to create great content easily - not as a way of enabling spam account. We ended up removing that feature.

More info on our findings here:

http://beatrixapp.com/blog/5-social-content-rules-we-have-le...

I don't really have much sympathy for a company that expects to reap the rewards of social media engagement, but thinks it takes way too much time to... engage socially.

But it is too much time when you're a one person or small team. Twitter is 24/7 and can be incredibly hard to crack where you're audience is. I run http://www.ugtastic.com and since I'm focused on tech and tech people tend towards Twitter than other platforms I put my effort there but getting insight into which Tweets get any sort of interest feels nearly impossible.

Which tweets get interest is just whatever catches people's attention that day. I can't tell what snarky quips are going to be popular either.

I don't think you need a huge Twitter presence. It's nice to have a handle to include when I want to give feedback, but I don't follow any companies, and unless they're directly helping me solve a problem (which is rare), I mostly find it kind of annoying when they try to talk to me.

I'm no marketing guru, but I thought the whole point of social media was that word-of-mouth moves much more quickly. You shouldn't need to try to manipulate that to get attention; just build something neat enough that other people want to talk about it.

Yeah, just as a data point, I look for activity like this (which already exists, all over the place) to decide whether to follow somebody on Twitter. If I see a bunch of what I believe are automated "share stuff and pray" posts, there's no way I'm following.

It's also sad to think that people might believe they're getting ahead at social media somehow by essentially running a robo-link service. But maybe I'm missing some part of the equation with this new offering. Perhaps the robo-links weren't relevant enough in the past, and these are extra relevant robo-links.

This is pretty good.

I've been looking to outsource the portion of building an early-stage company that consists in generating posts and blogs (on the roller-coaster ride that is building a company, or any other subject), so that as a founder someone can actually work on solving problems instead of blogging about how it is a roller-coaster ride, etc. It would be amazingly helpful to those involved in building something new and raising a seed round on it. There is a very good reason that blogging and social engagement is important to building a company at the seed stage, but these have nothing to do with solving an actual problem. If some of this could be outsourced it would be amazing for actually being able to build things.

I don't think investors invest in solutions. I think they invest in signals as well as their own conception of what kind of a company they would like to invest in, i.e. its Internet footprint. (Though your mileage may vary of course.)

I strongly suggest freshpost.io go off in this direction (especially since they know about the startup scene, being one.)

Basic premises: startups need to do two things. Build something. Talk about it. What is more important? Well, talking about it. Because if you build something but don't talk about it, nobody can know. But if you actually devote your effort to talking about it, then you only have so much left to solve things... The best of both worlds would be to be able to build something, while still having a blog and online presence. Then you can have something, while not being in the bizarre position of being an Internet company without an Internet presence.

Frehpost.io could solve this problem.

Interesting concept, and I wish you luck. Picking out the "interesting" stuff is tough, and categorizing it is even tougher.

I'm curious why your examples show sports scores categorized as "Entertainment/Culture Education"?

There's a small typo here:

http://www.freshpost.io/

> "and would like to cancel your subscription, simple contact us within"

s/simple/simply/

Thanks for that, fixed it now. The algorithm is not very good right now, but I'm working on a system of manual curation supplemented by machine learning, with the eventual goal of making it mostly automated.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on this side project for a little while now and am finally done with the MVP. This is a social media marketing automation tool. As of right now, it crawls the web for blog feed content and posts them on a schedule to a Facebook profile or page.

I plan on adding many more features to this over time, but wanted to share it with you guys to hopefully get some feedback and stay motivated on the side project grind.

I would appreciate any and all feedback, and if anybody would like a free account, please let me know.

Thanks!

I can think of one guy who would definitely want this. Update your HN profile to show your email so I can try to introduce you to him; or you can email me with more details.

Hey, would love a free account as soon as you get this working with Twitter.

Sure thing, I'll write your name down and let you know when Twitter is up.

Please, sum one! I'll be glad to be a beta tester when Twitter support becomes available :)

I'd be interested in a free account too!

Sure thing, shoot me an e-mail at support@freshpost.io and I'll get you one

Social media is not only about posting interesting stuff, it is also a channel to communicate with your users/customers. If you don't have the capacity to handle Twitter, FB, G+, etc. focus on one and do that one right.

Representing a brand through a bot, can hurt your business more than it helps.

I would absolutely have paid for this with my last startup, especially if I could specify which blogs/reddits etc to pull content from. I had a manual process that involved checking 5 blogs and 2 subreddits every day to pick out the top 3-4 interesting posts to link to.

May I ask what tool you are using to do this now? Or are you still doing it manually.

Not working on consumer-facing stuff anymore, so I'm not using anything. What are you using to find and pick out the best stories?

Lot of people in the industry (I'm one of them ;) ) use RSS aggregators like Feedly to do this these days. Feedly even has a buffer integration...bonus points.

Very cool - I don't really maintain any social media pages, but if I did I can see how this would save a tonne of time. Landing page is simply and easy to understand, nice work.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Beatrix

Seems eerily similar to http://beatrixapp.com - even down to the categories on offer.

Beatrix categories: http://beatrixapp.com/use-cases

I notice that this requires credit card payment to start a free trial - is this an MVP or is it an actual functioning app?

Either way, good to see more folks interested in this space. Buffer have been slowly moving more into content creation too, it's a validation of the problem. And it's a big problem to solve!

Cool to see you post here! We did draw inspiration from beatrix and a few other competitors in the space while building out this first version. The release that I have posted here was meant to be a first pass MVP, it is functional but could be improved upon a lot. Your site is beautiful by the way, keep it up!

Name and logo immediately made me think of Freshbooks.

Having a trial plan will be useful when you say you're validating the product and looking for feedback. Why not have it during signup?

You might want to check out http://beatrixapp.com/

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