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Marketing by suggesting your SaaS tool as a solution to a problem on social media

You often see posts on Quora, HN, and StackOverflow of people looking for a specific solution to a problem: "what do you use for <x>" or "what is the best tool for <y>". Companies can then jump in to offer their solution as a way to acquire new customers.

  • Is there a name for this kind of marketing?
  • Do companies spend a lot of time finding these posts on social media?
  • Do you know of any existing services that would reduce the time companies spend on this form of marketing?
posted to Icon for group Ideas and Validation
Ideas and Validation
on January 2, 2020
  1. 4

    Do you know of any existing services that would reduce the time companies spend on this form of marketing?

    A few I'm using / have used: Mention.com, Brand24, F5Bot, Warble.co, Syften.com

  2. 1
    • Quora is a world of its own, similar to Facebook, meaning that they actively fight any tools that might want to use their data and push the users to use the tools they provide themselves. They have algorithms that suggest questions for you to answer. They also send you emails. It takes some time to learn how Quora works. Read more about that here: https://noisecutters.com/how-to-get-1500000-views-3400-sign-ups-on-quora/
    • While what you describe is normal and even encouraged behaviour on Quora, it's the surest way to get you banned from some communities like Reddit or some forums. There you need to be a community member and build a reputation, some say to stick to a 10/1 ratio of normal community interactions/links to your product.
    • Some entrepreneurs, like patio11, spend years on Hacker News building a reputation. As he becomes known as a person, so does his blog readership, and thus his pitching ability.

    In any case, what you need to pull this type of marketing off is content that you can post. I've written about how to come up with infinite content ideas here: https://syften.com/blog/post/content-marketing/

    1. 1

      Good insights! So maybe challenge it is more about finding the right communities for your product and then making sure to engage with them regularly and honestly? Maybe that is a problem worth solving?

      1. 1

        Yeah, that's kind of what I'm working on right now :)

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