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Up until now, I struggled with the “empty party” syndrome. I was building a community for content sharing and storing, but didn’t have any content. As a result, I was trying to attract an audience without any reason for them to take Public Artfound.

The value created from the twitter bot I created made me realize I needed to do something with it. I was creating a lot of value for observers but unable to capture much of it for myself.

Since I recognized the IFTTT stream is useful to a wide public audience, I decided to build out my own IFTTT functionality. Instead of using IFTTT to move pictures from Instagram to Twitter, I am pulling them into the Public Artfound.

This solves two major problems I had in past experiments. First, I can curate. Second, I can attract users.

Based on controlling the stream of images, I will be able to throttle the frequency of posts put on Twitter. Before, I depended on IFTTT and didn’t have any control of the content. As a result, the current bot functionality overwhelms many user’s timelines.

The ability to leverage the exposure opportunity from Twitter is important. Until now, I have been receiving 30-100 daily favorites/replies/retweets on twitter. The majority of users are surfacing through search queries related to street art or graffiti. These users are not going to follow my account through twitter, but are likely to click a link with a photo.

The real value here is targeting Google. I’m leverage the images to capture the long tail of Google search traffic for small and mid tier graffiti artists. I’m going to be attempting to present the images in individual web pages. Using the existing tags and geo data, I will generate content to gain Google’s attention. This is a unknown field for me.