Show HN: We built a bot that knows the best time to share your content | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built a bot that knows the best time to share your content

8 pointshackathonguy4 comments

Hey friends,

Wanted to share Yala [0] with you - it's a project we've been working on for several months now. Yala is a social media scheduling bot that knows the best time to post to your social networks [1]. We've built a proprietary algorithm that studies the followers on your accounts to determine when they're most likely to engage with your content.

The way it works is really simple - you send Yala your content via Slack and she automatically schedules it for your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Yala's currently 100% free while we're experimenting with monetization options. It's been a hell of a ride building a bot, and we wrote quite a bit about the process in our blog [2].

Would love to hear your feedback and opinion!

[0] https://yalabot.com

[1] https://blog.yalabot.com/heres-how-yala-determines-when-to-publish-your-posts-d856f99591c4

[2] https://blog.yalabot.com

Interesting idea! I can see how this can increase the likelihood that people who are already follow you will see your updates. That said, if they're already following you, they're already likely going to be looking for your activity, right?

I can see how this can increase views/clicks on your content, which can increase the overall visibility of your site, which in turn can drive new users to your content.

In your blog post you also mention looking at the general analytics of the sites themselves, so am I right to understand you take into account other factors in addition to follower activity? For Slack, which doesn't have followers per se, is it based on overall activity? Activity in the channels you're in? I guess I'm wondering how "audience" is defined.

Glad to hear you've found success for your business with Yala. Do you have any comparisons of how it contributed in addition to other methods you're using?

Thanks for sharing!

Love the idea. What sort of social networks does it monitor? Do you have per-site specificity? For example, I might want to post at a popular time on Reddit, but only at peak/popular times for specific subreddits.

Thank you sir! For this initial run we're monitoring Facebook and Twitter, but we're definitely planning to expand to additional networks like Pinterest and Instagram in the near future. Truth is, we haven't given Reddit much thought till now, but it does sound like a good use case for Yala!

I think hackernews and reddit would be fantastic, to be honest.

How much machine learning is actually involved here? Or is it more static data analysis?

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