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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5732733

by gjsriv • 13 years ago

16 25 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

Price bands - 10$ per week (X posts on FB& Twitter) 25$ per week (2X posts on FB& Twitter- with 1 blog post every month)

Would someone pay for this?

reiz• 13 years ago

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.

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

Comments & suggestions desired :)

t0• 13 years ago

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

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

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

maldinii• 13 years ago

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 )

olalonde• 13 years ago

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?

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

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 :)

angersock2• 13 years ago

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.

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

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

angersock2• 13 years ago

Not much to do in the meantime otherwise.

ryalfalpha• 13 years ago

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'.

ezraroi• 13 years ago

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

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

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

driverdan• 13 years ago

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.

gjsriv6• 13 years ago

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.

aaronsnoswell• 13 years ago

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?

jaggs• 13 years ago

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

dsirijus• 13 years ago

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.

ISL• 13 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

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

clockwerx• 13 years ago

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

VLM• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

You sound so pg in this.

mipapage• 13 years ago

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.)

orangethirty• 13 years ago

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.

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

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