from Hacker News

How to get actionable leads from Twitter in real time

by farhadhf on 2/18/15, 3:03 PM with 64 comments

• by rememberlenny on 2/18/15, 4:20 PM

  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

• by fields on 2/18/15, 3:30 PM

  "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!"

  This is your problem. Right there.

• by untog on 2/18/15, 4:00 PM

  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.

• by davb on 2/18/15, 3:44 PM

  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).

• by jlas on 2/18/15, 3:25 PM

  50 lines of code which calls a paid-for semantic-analysis toolkit API. To the API's credit there is a free pricing tier available.

• by vpontis on 2/18/15, 3:35 PM

  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!

• by visakanv on 2/18/15, 6:24 PM

  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.

• by grinnick on 2/18/15, 3:32 PM

  I've had success using Mention for this (https://en.mention.com/). No code necessary.

• by shayanjm on 2/18/15, 5:14 PM

  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.

• by akashbad on 2/18/15, 5:21 PM

  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!

• by ktindenver on 2/18/15, 7:09 PM

  Similar recipe using R, MongoDB, Python and AlchemyAPI http://www.alchemyapi.com/developers/getting-started-guide/t...

• by floody-berry on 2/18/15, 5:14 PM

  > There are many people out there literally asking you to introduce your product to them so they can become your customers

  No, they aren't, but not a surprise that automated spam is a big hit on HN.

• by novacole on 2/18/15, 4:30 PM

  Why not just use an already created solution like tweetboss?

• by willu on 2/18/15, 6:43 PM

  What accuracy rate have you seen in the sentiment analysis from AYLIEN? Did you evaluate any others?

• by aw3c2 on 2/18/15, 3:31 PM

  Or just search for your product title on Twitter and automate that.

• by farnoud on 2/19/15, 1:52 PM

  It looks like marketing for AYLIEN rather than Taskulu.

• by jdimov on 2/18/15, 4:29 PM

  This is pretty cool for what it is. Ignore the trolls, none of them have any valid points.

• by monsty on 2/18/15, 3:44 PM

  Gith