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6 Comments

Does my marketing strategy cross the line?

Hi All!

Over the past few months I have been building a newsletter platform, https://postheat.com, and I just released a new feature that is itself a marketing strategy.

Let me tell you about the feature…

I read an article a while back about using the power of other networks to market your startup (i.e. leveraging Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn connections). In the article, the author used Twitter to create a viral marketing strategy by letting users create tweets with a link back to the authors startup as part of the product.

I have decided to apply this idea to postheat.com.

The key idea is to align my users incentives (growing and promoting their newsletters), with my incentives (growing and promoting my startup).

So, I’m adding a new feature to postheat.com that will allow my users to do just that – quickly promote and grow their newsletters on Twitter, while simultaneously helping me to grow and promote my startup.

This is how I am planning it out:

• I have added an “Insert Tweet” button that lets users import tweets from their twitter feeds directly into their newsletters while they are writing

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• When a user finds a tweet they want to import, they will have the option to automatically create a re-tweet, notifying the original tweet author (and everybody else who sees the re-tweet) that they are adding that tweet into their newsletter hosted on postheat.com, with a link to their subscriber sign up page.

Ex. A user finds a Product Hunt tweet to add to their newsletter, so they click the mail icon.
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The Tweet is added to their newsletter...
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A tweet is then created with a notification to Product Hunt indicating where they can subscribe to the newsletter that is writing about their tweet. Here I’m using the PostHeat twitter account, but Tweets will be sent from each users respective Twitter account.
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A percentage of Twitter users who see the tweet will sign up for the newsletter, and another percentage will start their own newsletters on PostHeat.com, repeating the marketing cycle.
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I’m hoping that this will help to serve my users by providing them an easy way to promote their newsletters, as well as, an organic / viral marketing strategy for my startup. However, right now the retweet checkbox is checked by default when users choose to import a tweet into their newsletter, and I’m not sure if this is crossing the line with my users. Although I do provide an explanation of what happens if the box is checked, I am trying to decide if this should be more of an opt-in feature.

How would you feel if you ran into this as a user? I’d appreciate any thoughts, as I really do believe this feature will benefit both my users and my startup.

  1. 2

    The fact that you're asking the question here is a great start!

  2. 2

    Really nice addition. I'm not a user, but would probably love this option if I was promoting a newsletter.

    That said, I would definitely prefer to have the choice, rather than retweeting by default. Having it automatically retweet would be a little embarrassing and might even anger me personally.

    For reference- I hate 'paying with a tweet', and any mechanic that seeks to use my social capital as its' own currency feels almost similar to being hacked.

    When I choose to do it, it's obviously a very different story.

    Hope that's helpful. I know it's probably a strong opinion, but I would imagine most users will opt to retweet anyway- it's hugely in their own interest, and seems so simple to use.

    Well done!

    1. 1

      Thanks for the thoughtful feedback - this makes me think I need to make an adjustment to my UX - maybe something like, when the user first imports a tweet, ask them what their preference is, then set that to the default, and give them the option to change it when they import future tweets.

  3. 1

    I'd love this feature if I were promoting a blog. How can this be used for a website too?

    1. 1

      How is your blog / website setup? Are you self-hosted, or are you using an existing platform?

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