Get the customers of your competitors









How to reach out to potential customers

In this tutorial we will scrape data from Twitter and search for potential customers we could reach out.

Contents

1. Overview

2. Create an Apify account and create an actor

3. Select the Twitter Hashtag Scraper

4. Create a Google Sheet

5. Save data and find potential customers

6. Contact potential customers and save more data

What you will need

1. An Apify Account

2. A Zapier Account

3. A Google Account with google sheets

Overview

Social media is one of the best places to reach out to potential customers. Customers are quite vocal about their experience with different products on social media sites these days. If you have a customer whose problem was left unsolved, there is a great chance that he/she will talk about the frustration on social media. This can be your chance to get in touch with them and offer your help/service. For example, Demand Curve helped Memberful to get a lot of new users by scraping the customers of their competitors and reaching out to them via an cold email campaign - this ended up to be one of their best cold emails campaigns ever and with a lot of new and happy users for Memberful.

Let’s try that out with some easy to handle tools.

First of all we need a tool to scrape useful data. For this task we will use Apify, Zapier and Google Sheets.



Step 1: Create an Apify account and create an actor

First, you need to create an Apify account. After setting everything up you can create actors from scratch or go to Apifys store and get already existing solutions.

Apify Dashboard

In our example we are going to scrape useful data from Twitter. Apify lets you scrape data from websites, forums, communities, Twitter, Quora or Youtube. In our use case we pretend to be a competitor of Namecheap and we want to scrape tweets where customers are complaining about them.

Step 2: Select the Twitter Hashtag Scraper

Twitter Hashtag Scraper

Select the Twitter Hashtag Scraper and after that at the developer console put in the hashtag you want to scrape - in our case “Namescheap”.

Add hashtags you want to scrape

Step 3: Create a Google Sheet

To save the data we will use google sheets. Begin by creating a new Sheet with two headers (User and Tweets).

Google Sheets - Create Headers

Step 4: Connect Apify with your Google Sheets

To get the data into your Sheet we need to connect Apify with Google Sheets - the magic will be done with Zapier. So after creating your Zapier account (if you don’t have one yet) go and create a new Zap. First you need to connect Zapier with Apify - to do so you need your API key you will find in your account settings. Choose the right trigger event - in our case “finished actor run” and then connect your account by putting in your API key.

Connect Apify with Zapier

After that, add your Google account and as an action event choose Create spreadsheet Row(s). Choose your created spreadsheet - in my case competitors - and add your worksheet. You can now choose the rows we have created in Step 2 to save the data.

Step 5: Save data and find potential customers

We are almost finished now - run a little test and review the data. If everything works fine you should get the scraped data into your sheet. Now we can search for customers having problems with namecheap. We are going to search for unhappy users. With Cmd+F you can easily search for specific words like for example bad or worst.

You will easily find tweets from Namecheap customers complaining about the product or service. This is your chance to help them and offer your help.

Saved Data from Apify

Step 6: Contact potential customers and save more data

The last step is to contact the potential customers offering them help or a solution for their problems. Write them a nice Tweet offering them help and suggest to use your product. In the following you see an example tweet.

Tweet example

With this setup you could now easily scrape more data from other websites and social media channels and build an automated screening process to find potential customers for your service.