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Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

I use Twitter for lead generation via IFTTT.com.

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

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Twitter lets your bot post thousands of times a day without then banning the account? Via the API?

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.

My other thought is that even if I liked the bot's content, I'd never be able to follow it. I'd get blasted by the firehose.

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?

Especially when those sort of numbers might be used to justify the price of advertising on the platform.

That said, I wouldn't say that it's in their BEST interest– too much spam and real users start getting turned off. So spam up-to-a-point.

I had the same thought. It seems unlikely, but not impossible.

Updated. I meant over a thousand. Not a couple thousand.

You've released my secret! ;)

Do you profit from the app somehow?

What's the meaning of src=typd ?

No. Personal project because I love graffiti.

I ran a series of experiments via http://newpublicartfoundation.com

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.

I use Instagram because the sheer number of photos posted daily and the geotagged meta data.

Can I email you? My gmail is nleschov.

The src=typd was a carry over from Twitter. Removed it.

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