I made a tool to automate your Twitter DMs
hivoe.com
hivoe.com
Seems like a tool to turn a Twitter account into a marketing chatbot that abuses follows as a trigger to start a conversation.
Automatically inserting an uninvited chatbot into someone’s DMs isn’t a great way to foster a sense of authenticity. This is the kind of tool used by marketers who think every channel must be quickly exploited to either convert the person or make them so annoyed they disengage. Not great for long-term engagement.
Side note: I’m always suspicious when PR pieces like this rocket up the front page. I wouldn’t expect a Twitter follow auto-DM chatbot targeted at social media marketers to organically collect this many upvotes from the generally anti-marketing, anti-social-media, anti-chatbot HN audience.
I totally understand your first reaction "this is tool for marketers willing to use automation tools to bother people" but actually it's not like that.
The tool internally fosters a collaborative and helpful behavior, and clearly asks to avoid spammy content.
The users of Hivoe are willing to kickstart conversations! And that's the way I've been using it since the beginning.
If you behave differently, like in a spammy markerting only oriented way, the users will probably be likely to mark you as a spammer on Twitter. End of the account.
I hope you got my point. Nice to share our opinions!
> The tool internally fosters a collaborative and helpful behavior, and clearly asks to avoid spammy content.
I hope you can see the other perspective, which is that simply asking your users to use a tool in positive ways doesn’t automatically make it a positive tool. The tool doesn’t really foster anything other than delivering messages to contacts that follow.
Twitter is spammy enough as is. I don’t want my DMs hijacked to be another channel for unsolicited content generated by bots.
This is against Twitter ToS:
“ You may send automated Direct Messages to users so long as:
- in advance of sending the Direct Message, the recipient(s) have requested or have clearly indicated an intent on Twitter to be contacted by you via Direct Message, for example by sending you a Direct Message;
- and you provide a clear and easy way for such users to opt-out of receiving automated Direct Messages, and promptly honor all such opt-out requests.
The fact that a user is technically able to receive a Direct Message from you (e.g. because the user follows you, has enabled the ability to receive Direct Messages from any account, or because the user is in a pre-existing Direct Message conversation with you) does not necessarily mean they have requested or expect to receive automated Direct Messages from you.”
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
I'll check it out.
In fact, I'm almost sure that would make me unfollow immediately.
That said, is this meant for people or for brands?
You'll be surprise to discover that actually many people reply back, and a few unfollows happened due to that message in the last 6 months.
It's suited to everyone who wants to kickstart conversations, the welcome message it's just an icebreaker, as you jump into the conversation after the reply.
It's for indie hackers, product builders, SaaS founders, agencies, and so on.
That's going to be spam bots mostly.
I hope you have the good grace to retire the service once that becomes obvious, but let's just say HN requires me to assume good faith and I'll leave it at that.
That's why I tested the feature myself before building the product.
The results had been very good, so I started developing. A lot of users are very happy with that and had been able to kickstart many meaningful conversations
And it seems to be the best way to approach it.
How do you measure engagement?