
Show HN: FreshPost.io – Automated Social Media Marketing - holoiii
http://www.freshpost.io
======
liquimoon
Founder of ContentDJ
([http://a.contentdj.com/1nrbICq](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](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](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...

~~~
michaelmior
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.

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eevee
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.

------
isaacn
Disclosure: I'm the founder of Chirpsy:
[http://chirpsy.com](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?

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sixQuarks
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.

~~~
fookyong
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](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...](http://beatrixapp.com/blog/5-social-content-rules-we-have-learned-
running-beatrix.html)

~~~
eevee
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.

~~~
ugtastic
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](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.

~~~
eevee
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.

------
logicallee
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.

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jcr
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/](http://www.freshpost.io/)

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

s/simple/simply/

~~~
holoiii
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.

------
holoiii
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!

~~~
gk1
Hey, would love a free account as soon as you get this working with Twitter.

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

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

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yaph
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.

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trevorcreech
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.

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

~~~
hughstephens
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.

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rheotron
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.

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fookyong
Disclosure: I'm the founder of Beatrix

Seems eerily similar to [http://beatrixapp.com](http://beatrixapp.com) \- even
down to the categories on offer.

Beatrix categories: [http://beatrixapp.com/use-
cases](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!

~~~
holoiii
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!

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whatthemick
Name and logo immediately made me think of Freshbooks.

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jayyvis
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?

------
terpua
You might want to check out [http://beatrixapp.com/](http://beatrixapp.com/)

