

Your competitors Twitter followers = your next contact list - chunkyslink
http://13.7billionyearslater.net/2010/11/20/contact-thousands-of-potential-customers-by-looking-at-who-follows-your-competitors-on-twitter/

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msy
Words can barely express how much I love being spammed by competitors of a
company I like enough to follow on Twitter. I'll certainly rush to give them a
try, not hit them block button and mentally file them under 'wilfully does not
understand Internet etiquette, arrogant assholes happy to waste strangers time
to hawk their crap'.

~~~
nestlequ1k
It's good information, if used correctly.

Just spamming them is the wrong approach. However, you can pull these records
into your own DB and then use this as a lookup table (for example: when people
sign up to contact them directly to close the sale).

Probably some other creative uses as well. As long as it avoids spamming
everyone at once.

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zackattack
does twitter offer an email->twitter handle lookup API?

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jpcx01
They used to. Probably they removed it to prevent this very case.

Here's the related issue #: <http://code.google.com/p/twitter-
api/issues/detail?id=353>

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jordanmessina
The much better approach would be to find about 5-10 competitors on Twitter
and take the intersect of all their followers. Those are people that actually
care about your market.

I saw an app on App Engine out there that did this, and I've considered for a
long time trying to make a business out of tools like this to analyze
competitor's usage of social media to attempt to find decent leads.

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oldstrangers
So this guy is openly declaring his intent to spam a bunch of people.

Honestly, good luck with that. Twitter has a lot of measures in place to
prevent people from abusing this sort of thing. For example, you can't just
auto add 10,000 people (you technically can, but Twitter will ban you).

~~~
ZeroMinx
Well, yes, but this is still quite interesting (imho).

In the old days, the competitor had an email list. You couldn't know how many
or who were subscribed. In a twitter world, it's all out in the open.

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RBr
Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad
idea.

However, you can quickly target people who evangelize your competitors by
tracking which of those followers who re-tweet and follow competitors on other
social networks.

Those are really the users that you want. Identify them and give them a reason
to get behind you.

Mass following any group of people on any social network won't increase your
reach. Targeting specific groups of users, identifying what they want and
giving that to them will.

~~~
adrianwaj
to do this, try:

\- going to <http://twitya.com>

\- enter competitor's twitter account, hit return

\- see which users are replying or mentioning the competitor

\- enter into a conversation with each one

\- if they won't use or try your product, they might at least follow you if
you give good reason, and are courteous.

\- also see the friends of the competitor that you can follow too

\- read the competitor's tweets

~~~
RBr
Or just build your own. It's super easy with the API's and can be customized
with much better search-and-match rules than anything out in the wild.

Some of my personal favorite stats are to watch people who RT more than once
over a set time period about the competition.

"Like terms" is also handy because then you can add terms that are directly
related but not identical to your competitor.

I'm sure that the big brand folks are already doing this and that there are
paid tools ... but on a smaller scale, it's fast and easy to whip this sort of
monitoring up.

The hard part is figuring out what these people want. You really need to have
an insight into the weaknesses of your competition to accomplish that.

~~~
adrianwaj
I mentioned Twitya cos I built it :) What you mention sounds great, and you
could also run some twitter searches and subscribe to their feeds. The Twitter
ecosystem is so rich, and there'd be crossover involved between different
apps, and apps are being improved and new ones released continuously, with
this itself a big problem.

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JonathanFields
Beyond the spam issue, the twitter follower list isn't a very accurate list of
people with genuine interest in a person or topic anymore. There are so many
people and bots and who simply follow in the quest for reciprocation or at the
behest of the twitter suggestion engine without genuine interest

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ahilss
I would target people who are not completely satisfied with the competitor's
product. If I see people tweeting competitors asking for feature X, where my
product already has X, I will send them a message.

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marknutter
When I saw the word "clickbank" this post suddenly made a lot more sense..

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RoyG
It's the right idea, just waaay too simplistic. Twitter is very useful for
finding people who may fit your target audience, but it's not a spam and split
deal – you need to build up value in your own Twitter acct. to get people
interested. Spam is spam, even on Twitter.

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paraschopra
The idea should not be mass spam. But you can always try to see who are the
influencers in that list and then contact them through email personally asking
to beta test your service and be early adopters. There is nothing wrong with
this approach.

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QuantumGood
It's easy to build a mailing list by using Twitter properly. I know one
example of a 60,000+ email list built from a single Twitter account in around
two years (2007-2009).

Messaging those who follow a competitor is just the smallest fraction of the
techniques available for using Twitter for business, and one of the least
effective. It doesn't scale well, for example. Also, by analyzing data across
multiple social networks, a much wider variety of effective, non-spammy
marketing possibilities emerge.

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uast23
I don't think having 10000 followers on twitter means much in terms of
numbers, because lot of people just play the "you follow-I follow" game there.
But there is a good chance of finding some 100 odd genuinely interested
followers who sooner or later might use the service. So, although it sounds
like spam but not a bad idea at all.

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csomar
"Earn money by selling your documents, ebooks, music and photography."

That's a stupid idea. First, are they your documents (that is you own them)?
For photos, music, ebook... there are already dedicated services working on
that. I mean "dedicated". I don't think that a general one will beat them in
term of features, support and promotion.

Other things, like Music or Documents. First, you may not own them, so it'll
be illegal selling them. Second, if you do, who will sell their private
documents and who's the heck will buy them???

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chopsueyar
Don't like to read articles much? Take a look at clickbank.com.

They seem to be doing alright with a "stupid idea".

~~~
marknutter
Clickbank is a cesspool of spam and garbage.

~~~
chopsueyar
Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing!

