Growth hack idea lmk what you think
One of my best friends has decided to drop his current career in mobile application development and pursue what he likes to do best, in his case, it's to be a handyman and fix things. Has he got started he noticed that he is getting leads from facebook groups that his friends tag him when they see posts that contain "handyman" related keywords, i.e. if someone wrote "looking for a handyman", "can someone fix my kitchen cabin", and more... When he presented that to me, I thought that maybe we can just scrape facebook group posts and automatically look for those keywords, but it turns out that scraping facebook is not that easy... So I had to get it done :) It took me some time but I finally got it working, and the script is already sending my friend e-mails every time it finds a lead.
I wonder if this growth hack can also apply to other businesses. What do you think?
it's a really great idea, but scraping is against facebook TOS so i'd be extra careful, especially if you wanted to try to monetize it as a service :)
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/taking-legal-action-against-data-scraping/
Thanks for the heads up, I do feel that fb cases will be the same as the hiQ and Linkedin famous lawsuit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data
Also there's the approach that says that I won't get on fb radar until I get "big enough" and in this case, I might be able to fight this :)
For now, I think it can be a useful tool for independent service providers who don't have the time and capacity to go through fb posts looking for leads.
you might be right. although, i'd imagine they're pretty good at detecting this kind of behavior pretty quickly.
just throwing it out there, i felt i'd be letting you down if i didn't say anything 😂
i love the idea and definitely think people'd be willing to pay for it.
yeah, I get it and thank you for doing this. I'm also curious to see how good FB is in detecting bots and scrapers :) I'll try to give more scraping analytics as I go, for example, how many posts a day, how many fb groups, leads, and so on...
yeah, that'd be great. i'm curious as well, although i don't imagine it'd take many hits from the same ip within a few seconds to get on their radar.
I like it and I want to give it a try. Just sent you an email. Please also check the Spam/Bulk folder if you can't see it in your Inbox :)
I don’t think this is limited to any particular business, I see posts like this all the time on my facebook feed. Some examples:
I think you are right, I wonder if small SaaS businesses can use such a tool as well? what do you think?
Given the right audience, yes. Recommendations are a very powerful marketing tool.
This is a great idea.
mention has made a great business out of doing so.
look at https://mention.com it is down that alley.
We have/do used them in my company
Just because there is an existing business doesn't mean it's not a good idea for you. In fact, it's a great idea for like a "lighter version" or a niche specific version.
I wish you all the best of luck.
edit. I just realized the post is over a year old. lol. still stands though.
I'm sure photographers would love this for finding clients
Thant for the idea.