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Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

36 points| maintopbiz | 12 years ago |ritetag.com | reply

42 comments

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[+] oskarth|12 years ago|reply
This is a cool idea, but can someone explain why this requires the following Twitter permissions?

- Update your profile.

- Post Tweets for you.

- Access your direct messages.

In general I'm at loss why so many apps require so many permissions. They must lose a ton of customers from this. Anyone care to explain? Is it just a spam app meant to create a botnet or what?

[+] maintopbiz|12 years ago|reply
Hi, I am a co-founder of RiteTag. Don't worry we are not any spam bot. But unfurtunately, Twitter has only 3 types of permissions:

1) Read 2) Write 3) Direct messages

We cannot go only for Read because we need to allow users to sent and schedule tweets via RiteTag. But we do not send anything that user hasn't manually approved.

Write permission goes automatically with Update your profile even though we don't use it at all. As developers, we cannot select only Posting tweets. That's Twitter's policy. It doesn't make sense for us either.

Lastly, we were playing with direct messages a year ago. We don't need them now and we could turn them off. But in the meantime we got more than 7000 users and if we change the permissions RiteTag would stop working for them until they re-authorize it. This means all the tweets they have scheduled would not be sent.

Here is more info from Twitter, if you are interested: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model

[+] JacobAldridge|12 years ago|reply
My thought (as a non techie) is that it's just easier to ask for everything.

Need to use an open source library in building your codebase? No need to analyse everything to see which permissions it does or doesn't impinge upon. Want to add a new feature down the track? No need to consider whether it changes the user permissions.

And I'd be surprised how many people are turned off by the number of permissions - I'll almost always back off if there are any, and if I really want to use the product I have to trust them to do no evil. My guess is an awful lot of people are always living in that trust space, especially if they don't understand the tech.

[+] Jakehp|12 years ago|reply
After I saw "Access your direct messages." I cancelled my signup & uninstalled the browser extension. That permission is a bit too steep for me.
[+] level09|12 years ago|reply
I played with twitter bots before, and I tried different ways to maximize the exposure of my "automated" tweets, sometimes by parsing dictionary words, other times by targeting trending hashtags, but that didn't seem to generate much traffic.

I would be really interested in any statistics regarding the effect of hashtags, or statistics about users who actually browse/search through hashtags.

[+] minimaxir|12 years ago|reply
I submitted a post yesterday I wrote about using statistical analysis on Instagram hashtags: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7458540

The key takeaway is that there's a lot of variance in the amount of engagement even after optimizing your hashtags. Twitter would be worse since there's an implicit hashtag cap.

[+] binxbolling|12 years ago|reply
Can I give you some unsolicited feedback?

- On Firefox 27x the "Most Popular" note is overlapped on top of the pricing, making both hard to read

- the jump from free to lite seems a little large... is there no room for, say, a $5/mo plan?

- after authorizing Twitter in order to sign up, the site blanked out and I had to go back to ritetag.com manually, after which I was logged in

- I can't tell a difference between the colors for "tweets with low chance" and "tweets with high chance". I'm assuming one is orange and one is green, but like a sizable minority of your users, I'm essentially unable to distinguish between the two effectively given the shades you've chosen.

- Related, "tweets with a high chance of being discovered" wraps to the far left, instead of just below (so it looks like on the other side we have "tweets with no chance of being discovered discovered"

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to exploring more -- interesting concept, and I personally haven't seen this done before.

[+] maintopbiz|12 years ago|reply
Thanks a lot! We will check the Firefox issues and learn more about color-blindness to make RiteTag more accessible.

Regarding the cheaper plan, we'll need to think it through as small amounts are not profitable due fixed costs per transaction.

[+] onion2k|12 years ago|reply
Do people actually watch hashtags that aren't event specific?
[+] Doctor_Fegg|12 years ago|reply
My thoughts exactly. They always look a bit #desperate #tryingtoohard #inauthentic PLEASE RT!!!
[+] theriteflora|12 years ago|reply
I've recently joined RiteTag on their PR/Marketing team, and I understand where you're coming from. Many users on Twitter use it primarily to connect with friends, however, there are also countless users that work in PR/Marketing and other sectors that would have a need to connect with their customers as well as reaching to a larger audience. Since you can also search hashtags now on Google, keeping track of hashtags related to your topic of interest can be helpful!
[+] davidmat|12 years ago|reply
yes, social media mavens and SEO gurus ;)
[+] 1wheel|12 years ago|reply
I scroll through #d3js every few days to see what's being made/talked about.
[+] torrent-of-ions|12 years ago|reply
I thought this was a joke then I came to the comments and everyone is being serious. I guess they've changed what "it" is.
[+] donmb|12 years ago|reply
You can also look up the hashtag and check traffic there. If there is a tweet every 2s => too much traffic to get discovered. If there is a tweet only every 30min => chance high. Don't get why I would pay $15+ for such a service.
[+] theriteflora|12 years ago|reply
One of our goals is to make it easy for our users. It will reduce the amount of time spent on evaluating hashtags and guesswork. We are also integrated in places other than Twitter, such as Hootsuite, SocialOomph and Buffer. We have functions other than checking hashtag traffic where we allow you to schedule tweets, check for associated hashtags, and many more.

You can try out our service for free first to further evaluate the value of RiteTag. I hope you will reconsider!

[+] paulgb|12 years ago|reply
Does this account how often people search for each hashtag? Do people really discover tweets with generic hashtags like #Guide?
[+] osakasaul|12 years ago|reply
There is personal experience - from our people and the many that talk about hashtag successes. As examples, "operation wallstreet" rallied tremendous community support with #ows and then related hashtags like #owsboston etc. When there was media blackout about a rigged election in Iran and phonelines were even blocked, a hashtag spread the truth. What's more, it was my personal experience, during the big earthquake and tsunami (tidal wave) in Japan, and seeing how I could find very relevant tweets from hashtag streams rather than the cover-up on Fukushima on TV that led me to understand that hashtags have power - but that no one knew which was any better than another.
[+] adam-_-|12 years ago|reply
I clicked around a few pages and couldn't see anywhere which explained what the different colours mean.
[+] ballard|12 years ago|reply
Wow cool!

Would really like to see related tags, built in the usual big data algorithms / search UX way.

[+] PhasmaFelis|12 years ago|reply
What? I thought this was Hacker News, not Marketing News.
[+] osakasaul|12 years ago|reply
Actually, hashtags are not just for marketing, nor is RiteTag. People get plenty done, such as bringing people to #hackforgood or hackathon events, search for lost children, and more. But without a hashtag grading system, they really have no idea which hashtags are best for getting discovered.