Ask IH: Do you answer questions to promote your product?
I've seen this on Quora the most. But also on Stack Overflow (much less), reddit, GitHub, Twitter (and other SN), etc. and on HN, PH and IH of course.
Do you drive traffic to your product using this technique?
Would you use a service that sends you questions related to your product?
This sounds like an interesting idea, as long as it can help ensure that users don't get cross the line into becoming spammy. It's always off-putting to see people promoting their products in places that are barely relevant, or in ways that are tone-deaf to the conversation going on.
Yeah I thought about that too. What I have in mind is just a "don't lose your time looking for threads we will do that for you". Whether this service exists or not, people will spam anyway. Maybe this is going to lessen this pratice ... maybe not. Maybe some people spam because they don't know where to post so they just shout from the rooftops.
And thanks for your feedback.
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I also agree with this :) Thank you for your feedbacks I appreciate.
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I totally agree! The idea is just to provide related topics but how people answer is up to them (and I can't control that anyway). What tears me apart is the wrong side of it which is helping people spam. Maybe counter that with a paywall, what do you think?
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I do if I feel it adds value. And that's a very hard line to judge sometimes. The service you suggest does indeed sound interesting, even though it should provide for some means of priorization by importance, uniqueness, etc. Otherwise it'd end up being a 1to1 marketing approach.
Not sure of the reach but check out https://mention.com/en/ which seems more focused on social media mentions (which would include questions & comments) - I assume this would be competition.
Thanks for mentioning mention :) They didn't come to mind when I thought about this problem. On my side it's a really basic solution: you give some keywords I send you some links - that's it.
There is a lot of value and money in something like this for large brands for sure.
I've had the privilege of working with some rather large brands at the marketing company I'm currently a part of. At one point in time I built a rather small web app using NodeJS that tapped into Twitter's API and watched for tweets that matched both geolocation and key phrases. I can't mention the brand here, but the client was a big player in the Pizza industry and we were competing against other agencies for their business that would cover our entire state.
We used this data to provide an interface for the client that would allow them to communicate directly with their customers via Twitter. Imagine tweeting "I'm hungry for pizza" or "I wish I had some pizza" and then getting a response from a big pizza brand with a coupon for a free pizza. This was impactful and drew attention to the client. By targeting these responses to key geographic areas, we were also able to measure the impact on sales. Long story short, we got their business both for our creativity and ability to execute.
As a disclaimer though, as you get into Twitter's data streams, you will have to pay quite a lot for what they deem as their "Fire Hose" and we eventually stopped working on the app.
I say all this not only because you need to attach more value(the "what") to what you're building than just providing questions to hungry customers. Sell on the impact that your service provides and let the questions be the "how". There is a lot of validity in an idea like that and I'm positive you can make a lot of money with it.
First thanks very much for this feedback!
Large brands would benefit more using the full-fledged https://mention.com. What I want to build is targeting small growing products and Domino's or McDonald's would not benefit that much using my service (if they do then that's good :) but they are not my first audience).