

Ask HN: Would someone pay for managing their FB/Twitter feed? - gjsriv

Customer Research: We are planning to launch a service for managing the  FB and twitter account for users. With preset goals we will find most relevant content from around the world and post it on your FB and Twitter to keep your users engaged. 
Yes similar to Social media Management companies- but we intend to offer this service to SMEs and starups who are busy finding their next customer.<p>Price bands - 10$ per week (X posts on FB&#38; Twitter) 
              25$ per week (2X posts on FB&#38; Twitter- with 1 blog post every month)<p>Would someone pay for this?
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driverdan
I don't understand. What makes you think marketing agencies and existing SM
management companies aren't targeting SMEs and startups? I've met plenty of
people (and companies) who do this. I don't see what would set you apart from
existing services.

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gjsriv
Price point? there are plenty of services but none of them have a package
designed for the minimal need and budget of SMEs and starups. I might be wrong
in my understanding and thats the whole point of asking here. :) Please tell
me if I am missing some market intelligence.

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ISL
At $10/week, how much time are you going to put into a unique post on my wall?

Is there time for introspection? Will it be clever? Relevant to my friends?

Someone will pay for this, but it's going to cost a lot more to deliver a
quality product (unless you've got some very special software). There's a
whole industry on Madison Avenue that specializes in doing exactly this.

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aaronsnoswell
I don't understand your question. Hundreds of companies around the world
currently pay media and advertising firms to manage their social media and run
campaigns. I know several people who do this (manage social media for
companies) as a full time job. How are you different to anyone else?

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mipapage
If this was really well done, sure, I think there is room for this. Something
where you really make an effort to understand the company and its market. I'm
not sure this is what you are offering though. I mean proper market and
company understanding and great content curation.

Anyways, how is this different from the companies that offer up blog posts ala
[boilerplate + a mild dose of something special]? (Something which always end
up being of little or no value?)

(To turn the idea on its head, I'd love for someone to "find most relevant
content from around the world" that I am interested in and filter it to me.)

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dsirijus
I would. But I'm very doubtful any (semi-)automated service can lick the boots
of a competent and engaged Community Manager and bring anything but irrelevant
noise on my social channel.

If, by some magic you've concocted, it works extremely well, I have no doubt
you'd have many customers at even higher price points.

And, if it's not automated, I don't see you bringing any new value to already
established business spheres.

Also, Social Media Management companies now do far more for the money paid,
most powerful part not being news feed management, but entire online ads
campaign handling.

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ryalfalpha
I'm pretty sure there's a market for this, I was in talks with a major Chinese
company hiring to achieve a similar service for brands on Weibo (Chinese
Twitter/Tumblr mashup). But it sounded kinda scummy to me and I dislike social
media so I bailed.

They seemed to have a pretty manual system already up and running and were
working on automating a lot of the churn, not sure how well that would
translate to English markets, but I'd bet some companies would pay for it to
save themselves hiring 'that social media guy/gal'.

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angersock
I am going to be so happy when this whole social media bollocks blows over and
all of the companies who make a living off of it slide off into the great
beyond.

In the meantime, make hay while the sun shines, I suppose.

~~~
gjsriv
I like you but I hate you :) Peace .. lets just make hay while the sun shines

~~~
angersock
:)

Not much to do in the meantime otherwise.

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olalonde
100$ for one blog post... plus X FB&Twitter posts? I wonder how you plan to
make this scalable/sustainable unless you have some secret algorithm that does
all the work for you (which I assume would generate pretty low quality content
given the current state of AI). Otherwise, you'll likely need a pretty big
team in India or the Philippines and your service is then again probably going
to be pretty low quality. Care to share your secret with us or some
representative blog posts?

~~~
gjsriv
This message has been targeted as a Customer Research. And your response
brought me to the belief that 100$ a month is not so high for this service and
that people might be ready to pay me more. Thats good news.:) My back of the
hand calculation shows at 100$ a month I would be making money enough for
coffee. Would surely tell you the idea I have in mind- will DM you on twitter
:)

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orangethirty
Yes, people pay for his stuff. Just make sure to not post the same thing
across the board. It kils engagement. The way to do it is to simply hande the
content and create content around that content. Then simply run the meta
content through templates and post them up. People will go inthrough your
content and you can sell advertisemet there too. You will be professional
content spammers. Though your pricing is cheap.

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andrewljohnson
Already do pay someone for this, but they do a dozen other things too, and
they are intimately familiar with the company and product.

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clockwerx
See elance.com / article writing sections. There is a market. The offshore
teams are there already.

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reiz
Sure! There are already companies offering this to StartUps. Even remote
workers are doing advertising for managing social media channels. But most
StartUps just have a student for this job.

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maldinii
I clearly would be willing to pay for this, but what is also important for me
is to respond also to mentions+DM ( now we don't have them )

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gjsriv
Let me make a landing page and see if any one signs up. Would do it tomorrow.
Special Discount for HN :)

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ezraroi
Sure, managing a FB page or Twitter account is one of most impotent marketing
strategy today

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jaggs
How would this be different from the stuff they offer on Fiverr and other
services like it?

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gjsriv
Comments & suggestions desired :)

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t0
Do you plan on creating the content yourself? You could integrate with a
content service API and have it generated almost automatically.
<http://www.textbroker.com/us/client-api.php>

~~~
gjsriv
yup- My system does the work while I sip coffee listening to (justin bieber :P
) john lennon

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VLM
I think you're aiming at a rather crowded market.

I think the reverse startup would sell much better. Instead of advertising to
the public, act as a spamfilter for the public. Its about the same tech, but a
different customer base.

I think $10 week might be pushing it, but I'd spend $10 a month for a social
media spamfilter that just passes important stuff on to me. May as well
aggregate twitter and FB and G+ and all that into one "relevant" feed for me.

For example I want to know if someone important to me dies, gets married,
publishes a new book, major life change or illness, that's pretty much it. I
don't want to hear about idiotic memes, cat pix, bible verses, political spam,
sports, bragging about vacations, pop culture (perhaps with certain
exceptions).

For about six months I tried to track/log what I got out of facebook vs what
it cost. Its fairly expensive, roughly between a prime time TV show addiction
and a daily soap opera addiction. I didn't get very much out of it, and
nothing that improved my life long term, but it was extremely expensive, like
20-30 hours invested per "important" thing. I'd pay for a decent filter. G+
had a better rate of return and higher actual information flow rate, although
it depends what you're looking for...

I think you could automate this pretty well. How hard is it to rub posts up
against every version of the bible and tag anything that matches 95+ %? How
hard is it to rub all the picture up against some stock cat photos and tag
95%+ match as "cat photo". Ditto some other pointless stuff, like any post
with sports teams, players, and some random digits is spam. Anything that
looks/smells like a news story from any source on news.google.com, tag it I
already read it. Here's a OPML of all the RSS feeds I read, you can assume I
read everything in that feed, anyone reposting the news I already heard about,
just squelch it so I don't have to see the same thing 10 times. Filter all
that garbage. On the other hand "I'm getting married next March" well OK pass
that one along to me, its probably actually important.

I lived a long time without social media, and "missed posts" already have
elaborate social procedures around them, so false positive filtering is
probably a (edited: smaller) problem than false negative filtering of spam.

If no one has started selling this as a product, I'm not sure why (maybe the
platforms would be furious at the advertising blocking nature of it?).

What happens when two people on social media collide who both use an "agent"
or "assistant" service like this is probably a big problem. Two "imposters"
trying to carry on like they're both the real deal.

~~~
bira
You sound so pg in this.

