
How to get actionable leads from Twitter in real time - farhadhf
http://blog.taskulu.com/post/how-get-actionable-leads-twitter-real-time?utm_source=HN&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=techblog
======
rememberlenny
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](http://twitter.com/publicartfound)

[2]: Search term
[https://twitter.com/search?q=streetart](https://twitter.com/search?q=streetart)

[3]: Landing page [http://publicart.io](http://publicart.io)

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

~~~
chatmasta
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?

~~~
visakanv
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.

------
fields
"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.

~~~
listic
ok, how do I create a copy of that spreadsheet? I can't
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bZRFP5R6DvGTPkDrVhqy...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bZRFP5R6DvGTPkDrVhqyQCv8yUMsgLzFHud7kc8J1Zo/pubhtml)

~~~
farhadhf
Oh, sorry, I updated that link on Github but forgot to do the same on the blog
post. This is the good link:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bZRFP5R6DvGTPkDrVhqy...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bZRFP5R6DvGTPkDrVhqyQCv8yUMsgLzFHud7kc8J1Zo/edit?pli=1#gid=0)

~~~
listic
Thanks! Next problem: can't add a phone to my twitter account; like this:
[https://twittercommunity.com/t/cannot-add-phone-number-to-
tw...](https://twittercommunity.com/t/cannot-add-phone-number-to-twitter-
account/32348) I've created a ticket with support and it says they "usually
reply within few days". Is there a way to set myself up faster?

------
untog
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Depends on how they respond.

If I write "I'm finding $productA obnoxious because of $foo; any suggestions
for a replacement?", and I get an automated tweet about $productB that shows
no signs of actually solving my problem, then yeah, that's spam.

On the other hand, if I got a human reading my tweet (whether they found it
automatically or not) and responding with "You might try our $productB; we've
solved $foo by doing ...; see $url", then I wouldn't mind seeing that, because
they've actually offered me a solution to the exact problem I was complaining
about.

~~~
visakanv
^to take that a step further, the marketer shouldn't respond with "try product
X", but with further inquiry into the nature of the problem! I've initiated
contact with people that way and subsequently built lasting relationships with
them.

------
davb
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).

~~~
sctb
We updated the title to match the article.

------
jlas
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.

~~~
farhadhf
Yes, but you get 1000 requests for free per day, and It's more than enough for
tracking 2-3 keywords at a time.

------
vpontis
This is interesting. It seems like a very simplified version of what Socedo
([http://www.socedo.com/](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!

~~~
jakejake
Another one that I only know about because a relative of mine works there is
[http://kitewheel.com/](http://kitewheel.com/) . I think it's designed and
priced for large corporations, though.

------
visakanv
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.

~~~
farhadhf
I couldn't agree more. Sending out automated sales pitches is spamming people
and that's the main reason I didn't add auto-reply feature in the code. I go
through the tweets that get added to the spreadsheet and try to engage the
ones who might actually benefit from using our product with my personal
twitter account. The tool is here to help you find the people who might be
interested in your product easier (look through 30 tweets instead of 100s).
It's not supposed to/should not be doing the actual sales pitch automatically.

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

~~~
arbuge
AFAIK, Mention just does the real time monitoring part, not the sentiment
analysis on top of that.

------
shayanjm
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.

~~~
farhadhf
Yep, I agree that this is not a perfect solution, but it worked for us.

I'd mentioned in the blog post that out of 34 tweets that were added to the
spreadsheet, only 6 of them were solid leads. But going through 34 tweets to
find those 6 is a lot easier than going through hundreds of them over 8 hours.

~~~
shayanjm
Agreed. I think generating a more filtered list is possible - but would take
significantly more time than it took to build the sentiment analysis tool.

The results of the more-filtered-list-tool would be quite interesting, though,
as you'd essentially be modeling a set of "ideal leads" and determining how
close/far a set of tweets are to those models. Just figuring out an "ideal
lead" model for the segments you're targeting would be an interesting
intellectual pursuit.

I think I might end up building this...

~~~
farhadhf
Ping me if you decide to do it, maybe we can join forces, I've started working
on the basics over here, @farhad_hf on twitter.

~~~
shayanjm
@shayanjm on twitter.

I have a half-baked contextual analysis implementation which I could probably
spin into a high-volume twitter analysis tool. Was doing NLP analysis on
unstructured data (like news articles) and extracting topics + extrapolating
commonalities between sets. Could be used to pick up topics from tweets and
determine if two unrelated tweets are actually talking about the same thing
(without necessarily replicating the same syntax).

------
akashbad
I'm working on a tool called Socedo
([http://www.socedo.com/](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!

------
ktindenver
Similar recipe using R, MongoDB, Python and AlchemyAPI
[http://www.alchemyapi.com/developers/getting-started-
guide/t...](http://www.alchemyapi.com/developers/getting-started-
guide/twitter-sentiment-analysis)

------
floody-berry
> 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.

------
novacole
Why not just use an already created solution like tweetboss?

~~~
farhadhf
I didn't know about tweetboss, but they all cost something around $50-100/mo.
Although it seems like tweetboss is a desktop app with $47 for lifetime
license?!

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

------
aw3c2
Or just search for your product title on Twitter and automate that.

~~~
farhadhf
This does not give you people who are talking about your own product. It gives
you people who are already using your competitor's products but are looking to
switch to something like your product.

------
farnoud
It looks like marketing for AYLIEN rather than Taskulu.

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

------
monsty
Gith

