Is it illegal to message all my competitors facebook and twitter followers?

Casper

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Is it illegal to message all my competitors facebook and twitter followers?

Maybe unethical but generally social media followers of ecommerce stores are usally customers.

so by contacting each and every one of them, I'm contacting people who are

1 in this niche
2 willing to spend money on this niche
 
Its legal until the follower complains/reports your messages. As you said, its unethical but you can still find ways to attract their followers rather than just private messaging them.
 
How about making yourself a Better brand which influences all of them naturally to your product/Services!
 
I'd do it, especially if you can kill the competition
 
As seoways pointed out, its legal as long as people find your way of approach unethical.. Point to consider is, you need to ensure the product you intend to sell satisfies the end viewer's requirement and he doesn't get compelled to report/complain about them.
 
In a lot of cases, you can target fans of specific pages with ads on Facebook.
 
How do you message people on twitter that aren't following you?
 
If you do this on facebook won't your messages go to that other folder that nobody notices?
 
I doubt it could be considered illegal, defiantly not ethical.

Legality and ethics aside, there are technical problems doing this. Depending on the amount of users you are trying to contact it could create difficulties as I would expect certain spam filters to kick in and start blocking your messages. So in essence to do this in mass would require a lot of accounts and proxies at least, and preferably a way to automate it all.
 
Rageix said:
I doubt it could be considered illegal, defiantly not ethical.

Legality and ethics aside, there are technical problems doing this. Depending on the amount of users you are trying to contact it could create difficulties as I would expect certain spam filters to kick in and start blocking your messages. So in essence to do this in mass would require a lot of accounts and proxies at least, and preferably a way to automate it all.
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casperjs would be my port of call :wink:
 
Casper said:
casperjs would be my port of call :wink:
Click to expand...

Yeah casperjs works for a lot of things, but I've run in to weird stuff in the past. Haven't used it in a while, looks like they got a new front page up. I've found Selenium to be better as it runs everything right in a browser window should work in almost all cases.
 
Rageix said:
Yeah casperjs works for a lot of things, but I've run in to weird stuff in the past. Haven't used it in a while, looks like they got a new front page up. I've found Selenium to be better as it runs everything right in a browser window should work in almost all cases.
Click to expand...
the last phantomjs versions before 2.0 had some really odd bugs but alot of these have been sorted since.
casper is an awful lot faster. For sites like plenty of fish I would use selenium (as they have a grade a bot detection system) but for the majority of social media.

ticket touting is where the serious serious money is with automation but thats a bit of a sore subject in the uk at the moment

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/oct/19/touts-using-bots-buy-tickets-face-jail
 
Not sure about the legality, so not going to comment on that part.

Selenium and CasperJS are both pretty decent for automating tasks. Selenium has support for multiple languages and multiple ways (record vs code) so there is that too.

Oh, yeah, and: Funny to see @Casper talking about Casper :-)
 
Personally, if someone spams my inbox with their services that I didn't ask for, I make it a point NOT to shop with them. It's probably legal, but it looks shady and will do more harm than good for your business.
 
Spam messages into people inboxes could taint your brand. While I've not personally done it I'm sure there are tons of ways to market and re-target towards a specific segment of users on various platforms (facebook, twitter, even adwords).

Your thinking process is correct, you want those customers, and thankfully you know who they are because they follow your competitor. However, you may want to stay high-road on this and find a straightforward/non-intrusive way to market towards them. Since this is exactly what ad platforms sell nowadays, I'm sure you could make it work.
 
If it's not forbidden by law you can go as far as your wallet reach. I don't like it, but that's reality.
 
I'm also considering doing this. There is one major competitor in my niche and from what I've seen their users are not quite happy with them.

Still thinking about it though as I don't want to damage my brand by coming across as unethical.
 
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