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How to market to developers on Twitter: Learnings from 4 months of Supabase feed
- verdverm 4y agoThe immaturity (or redditness) of their twitter is why I stopped following them. I don't want my feed filled with their memes and dumb questions, it does not add value for me, and gets in the way of other content that might.
- ushakov 4y agothey do it even in their blogposts https://supabase.com/blog/should-i-open-source-my-company https://supabase.com/blog/should-i-open-source-my-company so annoying
- verdverm 4y agoThere are some marketers out there selling memes as a strategy, seems more like a growth hack than real content strategy
- kuba_dmp 4y agoFor sure it's a tactic not a strategy. But imho could be a good way of getting ppl to follow the account. Come for the memes stay for the conversion/awareness bits.
- verdverm 4y agoIt's a fallacy to think what you prefer extends to the general population. By using tactics over strategy, you might get twitter users to follow your twitter account, but are they actually using the product, and the kind of user you really want? Are they going to convert into the high-value enterprise plans they need to sustain their business, or will it attract a bunch of freeloading users who take up support time? Does this meme tactic actually work against your business needs? (by turning away more professionally discorsed people)
- kuba_dmp 4y agoAgain (said that somewhere here), engagement is necessary, not sufficient. I do believe their memes resonate with the very customer they are going for, yeah.
- kuba_dmp 4y agoSeems like this "let's not be serious" is exactly why they resonate with folks imho. their numbers seem to show that a ton of folks do like it.
- verdverm 4y agoresonates with folks like you, and memes are typically more shared among people who like memes. But then you push away a lot of other users. Are the likes and interactions on twitter converting? Or are people just following for the hot takes and entertainment? How do you know that is transitioning into a successful campaign with the type of users they need to cross the chasm? (tl;dr you'd have to be on the social / marketing team to see their private numbers)
- kuba_dmp 4y agoGetting engagement is necessary, but not sufficient. I don't know for sure, but from all the dev companies I saw on twitter, I bet on them doing well signup/results-wise.
- verdverm 4y agoI would bet the phrase "open source firebase" has been 10-100x better as a converter
- kuba_dmp 4y agoYep, quite sure you are right. Solid positioning is key with dev tools. All I'm saying is out of all companies trying to reach folks on Twitter Supabase is doing (imho) very good job.
- verdverm 4y agobecause you like memes, most people do not want the companies they are trying to build on to be unprofessional all the time, it's not a good look hopefully the other commenters have helped fill in this broader perspective
- kuba_dmp 4y agoAny Twitter company accounts that you do like btw?
- verdverm 4y agonope, not really, most use it only as a marketing tool, trying to force feed their garbage down our throats, rather than engaging with us as humans, in a conversation.
- replygirl 4y agojust looked up random companies on twitter and found @yeticoolers. looks like all the posts are about yeti products or sports stuff sponsored by yeti. no direct engagement bait. if yeti imitated supabase, they might post vince mcmahon getting more excited the cooler a beverage gets, or drake doing a "no" gesture toward a warm beer, or "post your favorite thing to keep cool". does any of that sell you on a yeti cooler?
- bena 4y agoI'm overall fine with immaturity. I'm also overall fine with making references/memes/whathaveyou. Overall. However. I think it's made people think they're funnier than they are. Recognizing a thing is funny and being funny are two different things. And sharing a meme is just recognizing. Even if you were the first person in some subsection of your group to have shared it, someone else still made it. You're still repeating, verbatim, someone else's words. Now, there's also the case where responding with the right reference or meme can be funny. But it's not sharing Fry's "Shut up and take my money" meme when the Lego Group releases the next piece of buildable 80s nostalgia. And I think that's the problem you are having overall as well. Because "wrong answers only" is just not funny the 501st time you've seen it. I think if there were a little more novelty, it would be different.
- onion2k 4y agoIf someone is tweeting things you don't want to read then you unfollow them. That's how it's supposed to work. Everything is working here.
- verdverm 4y agoI'm more after the middle ground, and that is pretty broken (twitter's fault) The problem is that accounts post a mix of content and I only want a subset. Mostly it's about what I don't want, food pics, family & vacation photos, memes... that's not why I'm on twitter. Unfortunately, their feedback mechanisms are woefully awful and cannot seem to grasp this concept, or basic user preference.
- aantix 4y agoYou can mute keywords or phrases.
- verdverm 4y agoI do and am (un)pleasantly surprised how they find interesting ways to get by them... it's pure text matching rather than regexp or semantics based. But still, this is limited to textual content, and they will still show you the tweet because of the reply or quote tweet... however, I cannot say, "don't show me photos of food, family, and vacations" I've tried to say these tweets are not relevant, but they still push the same garbage to me
- madeofpalk 4y agoThe hard part is when you're interesting in some things they say, but not others.
- humanistbot 4y agoI don't want companies marketing to me on Twitter.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoYou're going to be upset when you hear about Twitters business model.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoI don’t use Twitter. Why would I care?
- adabyron 4y agoThis is why I quit using Twitter's home feed. Do not do this. I will not take you serious. I cannot stand all these attempts for popularity & likes. It's the equivalent of standing on a chair & screaming "Please like me!" Maybe I missed it, but I'm shocked they didn't say "Record a video dancing while you type code on a keyboard."
- senttoschool 4y agoI follow Supabase on Twitter. It's fine. It doesn't bother me. They also do this in their blog posts which makes it less boring to read through. I'm sure they'll get more serious once they are able to target bigger businesses.
- verdverm 4y agoWhat is stopping them from targeting bigger businesses now? They seem to list many big companies already: https://supabase.com/company https://supabase.com/company
- senttoschool 4y agoWow, that's news to me. Impressive. They're still technically in beta. I guess there's a huge demand for Firebase on a relational db.
- verdverm 4y agoI think it's more about demand for a cheaper firebase, they also benefit that you can self host / open source
- senttoschool 4y agoI really don't think price would be a factor for these companies.
- 4y ago
- yakshaving_jgt 4y agoBasically, how Twitter works is, you'll write a bunch of kinda-funny-but-actually-not-really sarcastic tweets disparaging JavaScript and Docker. Some of them will get about a thousand likes/retweets, and at that point the @iamdevloper account will straight up plagiarise what you wrote, pass it off as his own, deny it, and then block your account when you provide proof. It's that simple.
- qudat 4y agoSlightly off topic but I've found as someone who is constantly trying to get people to engage with my products and services that mastodon (fosstodon) to be highly value. I'll cross-post to twitter and fosstodon and I get much better engagement on average from mastodon. I'm sure if you have a huge following on twitter it's totally different, but for someone who only has 100+ followers, it's no contest which is better for me.
- skinnymuch 4y agoWhat kind of people are following you on Mastodon? Wondering because of its limited popularity.
- verdverm 4y agoalso important for context is, what are you building that is more popular there?
- skinnymuch 4y agoHah yeah for sure
- halotrope 4y agoWhile Supabase and their communication/blogs are excellent, the Twitter is not at the same level. I’d much rather have product updates and community QA over that cringy memespam. Feels like it was tried to adapt to the medium but the standards slipped in the process.
- swyx 4y agotheres a difference between stated preference and revealed preference, most of us aspire to more but we all regress to base instincts. also what suits you may not suit others. if you pull up a list of their top tweets of all time its all memes. the crowd has voted. and it got them enough of an audience, that when it comes time to launch their stuff, people actually pay attention: https://twitter.com/supabase/status/1554542300713426950 https://twitter.com/supabase/status/1554542300713426950 and they actually drive traffic to their videos https://twitter.com/supabase/status/1556201229222662155 https://twitter.com/supabase/status/1556201229222662155 supabase are executing on social media at a higher level than stripe or snowflake right now. arguably at some point their brand may have to "grow up" but the underdog relatable feel is definitely a fit for getting developers invested in their journey/growth as a challenger brand vs Firebase and eventually AWS RDS. as a business person/marketer you learn very quickly to distinguish personal preference from what is effective for the audience you are trying to serve (not saying that you should do anything and everything that works, as that path leads to darkness, but as long as it is authentic and has results there is some overlap).
- kuba_dmp 4y agoThanks @swyx, very valid points.
- daemond 4y agoI think the most important reason is that supabase is a good product. Marketing is just a plus.
- kiwicopple 4y agohey HN, supabase ceo here. interesting article, and interesting reading the comments this article is more in-depth than any analysis we’ve ever done internally - perhaps we should add it to the company handbook. in case you want to know how we think about content/marketing internally: - Twitter content has a half-life of about 2 hours and generally people there have a short attention span. we tailor the content for those conditions and pragmatically it seems to work (at least for the twitter algorithm, if not for some people) - Conversely for “HN content” we aim to go in-depth and we don’t shy away from technical content. - If we think the topic is somewhere in-between these two, we will write it more for a “reddit audience” - blog posts that are technical in nature, but nothing too in-depth.
- kuba_dmp 4y agoSound like adjusting/packaging message to the platform/audience. Exactly what good marketing is about. Keep up the good work, and thanks for the nice words!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- awalias 4y agohttps://twitter.com/supabase/status/1557437785815990272?s=21&t=W78lFvP2dqFSl-Jv4FjTIw https://twitter.com/supabase/status/1557437785815990272?s=21...
- krashidov 4y agoIt looks like y’all are doing a great job! How did you hire to make content this good? Is it just a bunch of devs in a slack channel making memes? How do you make sure you’re not scaring off the serious enterprise buyers by having a meme twitter? Have you been able to measure any real growth as a result of the success of this twitter account ?
- kiwicopple 4y ago> content this good The memes are mostly Ant (my cofounder). we also have a #memes channel in slack which is surprisingly active (and a bit geekier than the twitter ones). For the blog content, everyone at Supabase is expected to write about what they build and we all pitch in on editing. > make sure you’re not scaring off the serious enterprise buyers We probably are scaring them off, but they sound like hard work anyway > measure any real growth as a result of the success of this twitter account We don't have anything sophisticated enough to attribute the growth to any particular channel - it's not really something we spend time on. We see most of our growth during our product launches (Launch Weeks primarily).
- PassageNick 4y agoPersonally, I love this stuff and think the results speak for themselves. I love a good meme and I'm not afraid to say so. If thinking memes are clever and funny is immature, I don't want to be mature. It seems to me that the only reason that a company would be on Twitter would be to market to people. There are different ways to go about doing that, I suppose, but the path that Supabase has taken seems to be working. I guess if you don't want to be marketed to by companies on Twitter the solution might be to not follow companies on Twitter.
- ulrashida 4y agoI struggled to keep reading after the author suggested "wrong answers only" was a useful element to integrate into an engagement feed. Are the target users children?
- kuba_dmp 4y ago"Wrong answers only" is actually a really good format imho. The best jokes that only folks deep in a particular tech understand come from it. And understanding those inside jokes means belonging to a tribe. Which in turn signals that a brand "gets" that tribe.
- ulrashida 4y agoI take the point - in group signaling can be enormously valuable at connecting to an audience. However, I'd suggest that "wrong answers only" is so hilariously mainstream at this point that it is no longer selective. It's funny maybe the first dozen times you see it, and after that it is simply a cheap call for attention. It doesn't feel like this would be a positive branding aspect. To each their own, however. Perhaps this is the look Supabase is going for!
- kuba_dmp 4y agoMhm, you are right. I think of this "wrong answers only" as a bigger post category. For example. "Make devops cry in 5 words or less" Does the same thing imho. Also as long as you get engagement it means it isn't worn out imho.