Updated 17 June 2021.

Copyright: European Union Public License, version 1.2 (EUPL-1.2).

What is this ?

This article is a guide to help businesses start an online presence and remain private while doing so.

Why do we need this ?

As the world further transitions into an online format, social media has gained a following not just in social networking, but also in business activity, with an emphasis on marketing. It is cheaper than typical advertising campaigns and can reach audiences worldwide at the touch of a button and it is for this reason that we use social Media to increase efficiency in terms of finding new contacts, whether prospective clients or potential candidates.

Yet, with an increasing online presence, information as at a greater risk than ever, therefore it’s important to know how to properly defend it. Government agencies have been known to even take harmless information and spin it in their favor. This is why it’s better to share zero information if possible, and this article will show you how. Since information is needed to start a social media account, we will start with securing information.

Contents of this article.

1. Privacy.
2. Choosing the platform.
3. Relevant platforms.
4. Creating the profile.
5. LinkedIn and further.
6. Scripting LinkedIn.
7. Syncing contacts to LinkedIn.
8. Twitter and further.
9. Creating a marketing strategy.
10. Importing contacts to Google.
11. Conclusion.
12. Notes.
13. Sources.

01. Privacy.

Before creating a social media platform, it’s important to understand that information flows very freely, and can easily find its way into the wrong hands. For this reason, we will share methods on how to ensure your personal information remains private. Always use a VPN for your internet connection. This is done to hide your IP which gives away your location and identity. It’s also recommended to use a password generator for passwords.

01.1 Burner phone.

Pre-requisite:

• A VPN for your internet connection (note 1).

Setting up:

• Step 1: Get a standard GSM phone (preferably not a smartphone) that has never been used with a SIM card under your name (note 4).
• Step 2: Get a pre-paid SIM card bought with cash in a drug store, do not use credit cards. Choose one that has no expiry date (note 2).
• Step 3: Activate the SIM by SMS, if you have no choice than to activate online, read note (note 2). Usually upon anonymous SMS activation the SIM can be used straight out of the box for 2 weeks before you actually need to register online. If you need to create burner (temporary) Google or Facebook accounts, do it now that you haven’t registered online your SIM card.
• Step 4: Activate the carrier’s account online (note 2).

01.2 Burner Gmail.

You will need a burner Gmail for later when we use the Google Web store in Bluestacks to import contacts. Simply sign up with dummy information and a generated password, and there’s no need to submit a phone number, or a backup account. After you have used it for bluestacks, delete it. You can always make another one later for free.

02. Choosing the platform.

The key to understanding which platform to choose is knowing the value it can add to your business, and which of your prospective customers or objects are fulfilled by that platform.

The features we therefore want to see are :

– Synchronize with our contacts through emails. Note that this is the opposite of what we would want for personal use. But as a business we have an existing list of clients and we want to be able to connect with them through social media.

– Show us which of our contacts are using the app. This allows us to follow people who are on our list of contacts instead of having to rely on the suggestions made by the app. For example, Instagram is going to explicitly tell you who from your contacts are on the app. Twitter is not.

– Show us who is following us back. This allows us to trim out people we have started following but are not following back, that way the number of people we follow vs our followers stays even. Twitter is good in that area because it explicitly shows who is following you. Instagram is cumbersome as you have to put side by side your followers and who you follow to manually trim out the dead weight.

– Allow us to send direct messages and to receive them. This is key as this is how we’re going to get new conversations. Shapr is good in that area as its Tinder-like approach is matching you with people so you have an excuse to start the conversation. Whereas with other apps, your messages are always coming out of the blue.

– Allow us to create groups and send invitations to all our contacts. This could allow to offer online meetings to do presentations on all sorts of topics.

03. Relevant platforms.

• Syncing with your contacts through emails:
  • LinkedIn.
  • Facebook (Note 5).
  • Instagram.
  • Twitter.
  • Viber.
  • Reddit (Note 6).
  • TikTok.
  • VK (Note 7 sync with Gmail and Facebook).
  • OK.
  • Facebook messenger.

• Not syncing with your contacts :
  • Shapr.
  • Meetup (Note 8).
  • Google Chat.
  • Discord.
  • Twitch.

• Syncing with your contacts but only through phone numbers :
  • Telegram.
  • WhatsApp.

• Allowing direct messages :
  • Twitter.
  • Instagram.
  • Reddit.
  • LinkedIn.
  • Facebook.
  • Viber.
  • VK.
  • OK.
  • Facebook messenger.

• Allowing the creation of group chats :
  • Facebook.
  • Facebook Messenger.
  • OK.
  • VK.

The following section will describe 4 popular outlets as well as short facts regarding user base and how companies generally use them, as well as potential downsides of using them. Note that these aren’t in any particular ranking order.

02.1 Facebook.

Facebook boasts 2.74 billion monthly active users, and while it reaches the highest figure of teens around the world, it also reaches people of all ages, making it the “bread and butter” of social media marketing. Although the user base is aging over time, it still remains at the top of the list in terms of reach among every age group. Companies commonly use Facebook for customer engagement; feedback and conversation. In addition, the Facebook messenger app can be used in conjunction with the platform, providing a means to reach potential clients individually. However, the size of Facebook can also provide its own challenges. Facebook is best for those seeking to maintain a customer base rather than create one (Note 9).

Facebook has the greatest network effect; in no time people will be following you. When you create a group you can then invite all your FB contacts. At the same time, the reason why we need to scrap our social media accounts every 6 months is precisely because apps such as FB will bubble wrap you into the same cluster of profiles, which are not relevant at all. You end up with “friends” from countries with no business appeal.

02.2 Instagram.

Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, commands a daily user base of 500 million, 88% of which are outside the U.S. What differentiates it from Facebook is its “organic” style of marketing. It is not “pay-to-play”, your follower base depends on how well you market your own posts (Note 10). Furthermore, the picture and text components make it better for those companies that want to display their offerings visually.

When you want to post something, such as a website update or a new sponsored project on open collective, there must be an image with your post. Unlike Twitter, it will not generate a preview of the link. It’s recommended to use a burner photo for this.

However, for a website update, you’ll need to create an image:

1. Using Libre Office Draw, go to “insert text box” and write your text. An example title: “website update 20 June 2021, use size 60 pt. font, align center, center vertically, and give it some colour.
2. If text is inserted into the image: Size 20 pt. is good.
3. Export as a JPEG, not as GIF because the background will be transparent instead of white.
4. Edit with paint 3D, crop as 1:1 image (square).
5. Import into android emulator.

If you have created your Facebook account using the same ID as for Instagram, you can publish your IG post on Facebook. However, it will be published on your timeline, not in a group. Hyperlinks are NOT clickable on Instagram posts, which seriously limits the interest of this app for sending people onto our websites (Note 11).

It seems the aim of IG is to lock users in the app so that businesses have no other way than to pay IG for advertising and selling within the app. From there, IG is of interest to a limited set of businesses. It’s of little use for selling services or expensive items. It’s more like a gadget store. It can also be used for brand building but only if the product has visual impact, like a watch or fashion clothing.

From there, you might as well put the entire text into the image rather than into the comment/caption section. However, if your post is also going into Facebook, put the entire text and hyperlink into the comments so that it appears in your FB timeline where the hyperlinks are clickable. Note that you’ll have to post in your FB groups manually.

The reason why we are importing email lists in our contact app is to “jump start” the network effect by getting the algorithm to work for us, and also to avoid being flagged and blocked, as if we follow our own contacts, it is not suspicious.  After uploading a contact list and allowing IG to synchronise, you should see suggestions of people to follow with the text.

“Your contact xyz is on Instagram as zyx” or “xyz, one of your contacts is on Instagram as @zyx. Would you like to follow them”. And then in front of this text you have the button to follow their account. What it means is that these contacts are going to receive the same suggestion to follow you, and if you follow them they are more likely to follow you back.

You can’t repost (retweet) on your own timeline posts from people you follow, so from a business standpoint that’s a drawback as you can’t broadcast to your contacts information posted by other nodes.

02.3 Twitter.

When it comes to customer conversation, Twitter is one of the first outlets that comes to mind. Here, companies can not only post updates using the “hashtag” system, making it easy to spread brand awareness, but they can also view and reply to individual users when needed. The user base of twitter is over 350 million strong, 70% male, and nearly 30% of users are in the age range of 25-34 years old. The user base is notoriously quick-to-respond, share, and spread their thoughts, so if you are looking for a place to gain feedback quickly, Twitter could be a great option. Further below, there is a guide to set up a private business twitter.

Even after cycling contacts many times, when going into the profile to add new people to follow based on suggestions, I kept having always the same suggestions based on the first list imported.

So between importing new lists, we have to go in the settings -> Privacy and Safey -> Discoverability and contacts. Untick “sync address book contacts” and then click on “Remove all contacts”. Allow 48h then upload a new list of contacts and reactive the contact synchronisation. That’s the only to be sure Twitter is going to start fresh with your new list and suggest to you new contacts and more importantly make you appear in the suggestions of your contacts.

02.4 LinkedIn.

Taking a great turn from all of the previous options, LinkedIn provides a more professional outlet. LinkedIn has a user base of 722 million people, with 76% of them being outside of the U.S., and nearly 60% of which are 25-34 years old. What’s interesting about this platform, however, is that 40 million people use it to find jobs every week with over 55 million companies on the website. If your company is looking to reach young professionals, find recruits, or pursue potential business partnerships, LinkedIn could be your go-to. We will talk more in-depth about using LinkedIn for business further in the article.

02.5 OK.

It’s a Russian app, and has some network effect. When you go into the “add friend” feature it has an “import friend” option allowing you to choose from, these options, with varying results.

• Phone contacts- Unable to find the contacts.
• VK contacts- Unable to find anything, meaning VK contacts won’t work.
• Search by photo- You need to take a photo of yourself.
• People online- It shows you a list of people you don’t know. After some time you will get a notification “You are sending a lot of invitations. Please take a little break”.

02.6 VK.

Similar to OK, has a network effect. When you go into the “add friend” feature it has an “import friend” option allowing you to choose from:

• Phone Contacts- Doesn’t work.
• OK app- Pulls same contacts from OK.
• Gmail- You must provide a Gmail account with relevant contacts then.
• Facebook- Doesn’t work well with LDplayer.

02.7 Shapr.

Shapr has zero network effect and doesn’t synchronise with the contacts. However it is a great app to get in touch with professionals. You can’t keep all our contacts hanging in the app if they are not showing much interest. Additionally it seems that if you have too many contacts the app won’t put more in your list, you’ll have no “matches”. After removing contacts you have plenty new “matches”.

But before unfollowing them ask them to follow us on social media.

Ubinodes on Twitter: @Ubinodes

Love4aviation on Twitter: @Love4aviation

Love4aviation on Instagram: Love4aviation_Official

02.8 MeetUp.

Pro: You can share your events on your Twitter account.

Con: You can’t delete a group that you’ve created. Incredible. It means if you want to deactivate a group you need to:

1. Remove all participants.
2. Change the title and description to make it clear the group is closed. For example, as a title I used “This group is closed”. And then you need a 50 characters description so I wrote “This group is closed. But MeetUp makes it impossible to actually delete a group. Go figure. And now I have to enter a unique description of at least 50 characters”.

02.9 Opportunity.

Link: https://www.myopportunity.com/

Pros:

• Synchronizes with contacts
• Presents you with potential contacts called “leads”, in a manner similar to Shapr, making it easier to cold contact people.

Cons:

• Seems that most users are service providers, so it may be harder to find manufacturers but may allow us to find good candidates.

02.10 SilentPhone.

The app allows you to find contacts by synchronizing with your phone. It is not a good idea to cold contact people from within the app. However you can use their email if you want to include them in an email marketing campaign specifically about IT security, for example our Sponsored Projects.

If you are not using SilentPhone, then send your email list to a Node using it so that (s)he can find users of this app and extract their emails to do targeted email campaigns later on. You can create “communities”, very similar to FB, you choose between Business, thematic community, brand or organization, interest group, public page, event.

Test:

First we created a public page. Can’t invite your “friends” to join your group. You need to pay for VK to expose your group to an audience. Then we created an “interest” group called “France export Import”. It’s more like a chat group. The you can invite your VK contacts.

Pros:

• Can create groups.
• Many settings for managing groups. Can create administrators.
• When you create a post with a hyperlink, it will offer you to select an image from the website’s page, so you don’t even have to import an image into the emulator.

04. Creating the profile.

Now that you’ve decided which platform to use, it’s time to create your profile. Make sure to use dummy information as we’ve discussed so far.

04.1 Facebook profile.

• Step 1: Go to this page: facebook.com/pages/create. You must have an individual account beforehand, if necessary, create a new professional one.
• Step 2: Click “Get Started” under business and brand, you should see this page:

• Step 3: Use your business or brand name as the page name.
• Step 4: Add the category that most closely fits your business/brand offering(s).
• Step 5: Add a summary of your business/brand in the description section.
• Step 6: Add pictures for potential readers to see.
• Step 7: Facebook has both a desktop and phone preview. Make sure to check back on this many times.
• Step 8: Make sure to fill every possible box, then launch the page
• Step 9: Make your first post and start adding people.

04.2 Instagram profile.

• Step 1: Similarly to Facebook, you must have an account already, it’s a matter of converting to a business one.
• Step 2: In settings, find account, and click switch to business account at the bottom.
• Step 3: Select a category that fits your business, and hit next.
• Step 4: Add in the contact information, and personalize your profile.
• Step 5: Start posting pictures with hashtags to build a following.

04.3 Twitter profile.

• Step 1: Create an account at https://twitter.com/i/flow/signup. (Note 12).
• Step 2: Add a profile photo (usually your logo) and header photos (media you want to showcase).
• Step 3: Add a display name (will be displayed as “@name”), which allows your account to be tagged in other posts.
• Step 4: Add a description, summarizing your business and goals.
• Step 5: Add any other relevant information to your business; hours, contact info, location, etc.
• Step 6: Begin posting, and pin a relevant post for potential viewers to focus on.

04.4 LinkedIn profile.

• Step 1: Go to this site: https://www.linkedin.com/company/setup/new/. (Note 13).
• Step 2: Select the option that best fits your business; ranging from small to large.

• Step 3: Add all relevant profile information and make sure to verify your connection with the company.
• Step 4: Click “Create Page” and begin posting, making connections, and getting involved with your community!

05. LinkedIn and further.

We use Linkedin as the primary social media account. This is because:

1- It is the main channel used for business.

2- It allows to search contacts based on their country or industry.

3- It allows to connect with people by synchronizing the contacts or uploading email lists, whereas Twitter will only make you suggestions of people to follow, it’s less direct and it takes more time to grow your network and have your posts read by a number of people.

05.1 Android and iOS.

This manual is written mainly for Android as it is the main OS used on mobiles, however it can work equally well on iOS. The only difference is that instead of using Owncloud for synchronizing contacts on your mobile device, we recommend you use Woelkli which is CarDav compatible with iOS settings: https://woelkli.com/en

05.2 Android emulator.

We are going to use an android emulator to use the applications (Tutanota, Linkedin, Twitter). For this manual we use Bluestacks as Android emulator. However if you have a spare android device without SIM card you can use it for that purpose. Note that you should not use it for any other purpose, in particular you should not have any personal contacts in this device, otherwise your contacts are going to be swalloed by Linkedin and Twitter and stored on their servers forever.

Pros and cons of using Bluestacks versus a seperate android device:

Pros:

• Cheaper, no need to purchase another device.
• Better privacy if all your internet traffic is channelled through a VPN (like a router: https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-software/vpn-router) and you use a burner phone. If you use an Android device you are tracked even without SIM and in flight mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0G6mUyIgyg
• Easier to write messages from a real keyboard.
• You can use multi-instances simultaneously, meaning you can have several accounts on the same computer, although you’ll need several burner phones to create them, or you can share them with other nodes. You can use the same Google account across multi-instances. When yo create a new instance don’t clone a previous one as it would import the accounts with it: create a fresh one and reinstall all apps.

Cons:

• Doesn’t work on Linux.
• Have to stay in front of the computer to answer messages.
• Can’t delete all contacts at once, have to manually do them one by one, meaning the only viable option is to use owncloud.
• When using multi-instance, contacts are shared across all instances, so you have to be careful when synchronizing your contacts with apps, make sure this feature is set to manual so that you can change the contacts between each synchronization.
• When using multi-instance be careful not to log into Linkedin accounts simultaneously as it may detect two accounts sharing the same IP as suspicious behaviour an block the account.
• Doesn’t have a good contact app, you’ll have to install one. The one that is included in Bluestacks doesn’t allow you to select all your contacts to delete them at once, which is something we have to do. Do not install the Google app as this is confusing when using Bluestacks, you’re never sure if you’re using Bluestacks’ app or the installed one.
• Can’t copy past the clipboard into Bluestacks. So make passwords that are easy to type in.

Multi-instance:

We recommend you install these necessary apps on each instance for ease of use in the Google Play store:

– Tutanota.

– Cardav-syncfree.

– Linkedin.

– Twitter.

– Contacts.

05.3 About the email lists.

Only for social media accounts: Email lists are not used for any other purpose than to get in contact with manufacturers and candidates through social media accounts. Do not use these lists for any other purpose, especially not for mass emailing them.

Delete your lists: We do not use the same list twice for the same channel, once it has been used it is deleted, so the algorithms won’t pick up on the use of lists.

Sorted by country and counts: There’s going to be thousands of emails available so they are going to be arranged into small lists, based on how they are going to be used: Import from Desktop, synchronised from owncloud etc. They usually are also sorted by country based on the domain names, internet providers etc.

Linkedin’s algorithms: The trick here is to get Linkedin’s algorithms to work for us in the most efficient way. We need to give 48h between two imports so that the algorithms have some time to create contacts and invitations.                                                                                                                                                                  

Beware Linkedin’s suggestions: For example, you imported 50 emails originating from France and they are mostly from the aviation industry. Now you have contact suggestions based on the invitations approved. At first, you may have to choose the same country and industry, you probably don’t have much of a choice if you want to start growing your contacts, however this is trapping you into an industry silo (Bubble). Later, when you have more contacts in Linkedin you choose from different country and industry. The idea is that we open up to as many countries and industries as possible.

05.4 Share accounts.

Prepare a folder where you’ll put a text file where you’ll note all the credentials as well as the profile photo. This allows us to pass social media accounts to one another if needed. Share it using Resilio. You can ask a senior node to give you a template.

Twitter: when passing on a Twitter account, you have to change the phone number in the settings as it is used for security and constantly asked to unlock an account. So the new user has to have his burner phone number in the account.

05.5 Profile photo.

For the profile photo, you can use fake pictures available on Resilio or an avatar (animal, object etc) representing the node (you) across all media. But it’s a personal social media account, even if it’s used for business purposes the final choice is yours. If you import a photo check it with TinEye Reverse Image Check to make sure it hasn’t been used anywhere else already: https://tineye.com/

05.6 Tutanota email.

From your PC, create a Tutanota email that will be used only for that. Create a password that will be easy to type-in on your mobile device. Note that Tutanota may freeze the account for 48h initially, this is an anti-spam procedure, it’s normal don’t get spooked.

You can upgrade to Tutanota business. Your money will help them develop this service and you’ll be able to create email aliases. It’s useful if you discard your social media accounts regularly (but don’t share them)., because then you can keep using the same inbox, just create a new alias for each social mdia account and destroy it once you don’t need it anymore.

05.7 Buffer.

• We use the SAAS Buffer to schedule post and post simultaneously on Linkedin and Twitter: https://buffer.com/
• You’ll have to create a seperate account for each instance, but you can re-use the Tutanota email for Linkedin and create a new password for it.
• We use one Linkedin and one Twitter account for each Buffer.
• On the free plan you can schedule up to 10 posts per day.
• Twitter has a limit of 140 characters, so if you want to copy/past the same content, you have to write short. But if you write contents for each channel, you can write longer for Linkedin.

05.8 Delete every 6 months.

1- We leave in a world where we can’t stop unlawful global surveillance, the only solution is to reduce the amount of data trail we leave behind us.

2- The aim of creating dedicated new social media accounts for Ubinodes is to:

• Build brand awarness for Ubinodes.
• Advertise our services to manufacturers.
• Recruit new nodes from different countries and with different backgrounds.

We recommend that you delete your social media accounts every six months and create a new ones. We consider that after 6 months, most of your contacts will know about Ubinodes, manufacturers or candidates will have contacted you. After 6 months, social media algorithmes will emprison you in a bubble, suggesting contacts of similar profiles: similar industry, similar country etc. We consider it is more productive and efficient for nodes to create new accounts and upload new contacts every six months. This will increase the likelihood of recruiting new manufacturers and candidates. We consider that after 6 months, an existing account has no more use than for bigotry. If you want to keep in touch with social media contacts for a long time, it’s best that you create another personal account, seperate from Ubinodes.

05.9 Next steps.

• Step 1: Create a new folder in your computer and name it “3V-Level 4 Lists for Linkedin” (ask for confirmation of this name in case it has been changed recently). Ask for the RW key and synchronise this folder with the rest of the team. This is to share email lists.
• Step 2: Create social media accounts by following very closely the manuals below.
• Step 4: Linkedin: send invitations to other nodes. Twitter: follow the other nodes. This will allow you to share/retweet their posts. You can find them in the apps by simply making a search for Ubinodes.
• Step 5: Create a Buffer account and add your Linkedin and Twitter profile.
• Step 6: On your new profiles, using buffer, publish posts to let people know about our past articles and our services.
• Step 7: Keep your profile alive by frequently publishing posts, searching for new manufacturers and nodes, synchronising new contacts, every day send invitations to connect with you etc.

06. Syncing contacts to LinkedIn.

06.1 Create an OwnCloud instance (desktop)

Open a free OwnCloud server: https://en.ocloud.de/product/owncloud.html

Note: you can’t connect while using a VPN.

Or you can use the one we share, via Zoho, make sure it’s not being used by another Node, delete all previous contacts you may find in it.

IOS: owncloud isn’t free on iOS, you can use Woelkli instead. Then simply add the Cardav account in the iOS settings. Download: https://woelkli.com/en

06.2 Install CSV to VCF.

Download and install CSV to VCF converter: http://www.csvtovcard.com/

06.3 Prepare CSV file.

In the Resilio “3V-Level 5 Lists for LinkedIn”, choose a .csv file, add a blank line at the top of the list, otherwise the first email won’t be imported.

06.4 Convert the CSV to VCF file.

Step 1: Tick the box “Source CSV file may contain multi-line field data”.

Step 2: In the properties define the field as email.

06.5 Upload to OwnCloud.

Import your VCF file into your contacts. See user manual: https://doc.owncloud.org/server/8.0/user_manual/pim/contacts.html

We recommend you upload around 1000 contacts. You’ll see in step 10 that you can sync many contacts by redoing the process. It’s been tried with more than 7000+ emails but one time, while trying with 9000+ emails the account got blocked and then LinkedIn is asking for an ID to unlock the account, so for us the account is lost.

Always delete the files you’ve imported so that they’re not used by another node or for something else.

06.6 Get link.

In your owncloud contacts page on the website access, in the settings at the bottom left of the screen, you’ll find the link to sync your contacts. Copy this URL into a .txt file.

Upload that .txt file into your file page of your Owncloud. That way you’ll be able to get it now from your device.

06.7 Install Cardav-syncfree on Android.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.sync

Give authorization to carddav to access Android’s system.

Using the URL and credentials from Owncloud, link it to Carddav so that contacts can be synchronized.

Sync all the contacts. That’s why you need a burner smartphone, otherwise the application would swallow all your private contacts and send them to Linkedin’s servers.

06.8 Install LinkedIn on Android.

Download the Linkedin app, set up a fake profile using a Tutanota email and burner phone: https://mobile.linkedin.com/

If you import a photo check it with TinEye Reverse Image Check to make sure it hasn’t been used anywhere else already: https://tineye.com/

In the app go under “add contacts” and authorize the app to read your phone’s contacts.

06.9 Invite people.

The Linkedin app will then send invitations to people who are on their network, based on the emails you have uploaded.

This will allow you to send thousands of invitations at once without any risk to be blocked by Linkedin since it is the app itself doing the process.

Note that the contacts are uploaded to Linkedin’s servers which is why we always delete the files that have been used so that no other node will use the same lists.

06.10 Add more.

You can then decide to repeat the process to connect with more people on Linkedin. To do so only have to put new contacts in owncloud and repeat the sync process.

1. In the LinkedIn app, go to you profile’s settings → “Sync contacts” → Untick “Sync contacts from this device”.
2. After you’ve uploaded a new VCF file in owncloud, resync your device’s contacts using opensync.
3. In the linkedin app, go to you profile’s settings → “Sync contacts” →Re-tTick “Sync contacts from this device”. You’ll be prompted by the app to find contacts and send invitations.

07. Scripting LinkedIn.

There are two scripts you can use, depending on your purposes:

1^st script.

Connects with all the users on the “People you may know” list.

setInterval(() => {

    $(‘button[data-control-name=”invite”]’).each((i, el) => el.click())

    window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)

    window.scrollTo(document.body.scrollHeight, 0)

    window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)

}, 5e3)

2^nd script.

Connects with a number of users you want. You just have to edit the number at the end of the script “Here is the only change you have to do: Change the number 10 with the number of connections you want to do”.

let arrUsers = [];

var numberOfUsers = 0;

var intervalUsers;

var lastWindowHeight = -1;

function startScript(numberOfCon){

    numberOfUsers = numberOfCon;

  connectWith();

}

function connectWith(){

  runInterval().then(value => sendConnections());

}

function runInterval() {

  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {

    intervalUsers = setInterval(function(){

        window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);

            if(numberOfUsers<=arrUsers.length || document.body.scrollHeight == lastWindowHeight){

              console.log(“Finishing interval, we already got enough users or we can not find anymore…”);

              clearInterval(intervalUsers);

            resolve(1);

          }

          arrUsers = document.querySelectorAll(‘button[data-control-name=”invite”]’);

          console.log(“We got ” + arrUsers.length + ” users (for now)…”);

          lastWindowsHeight = document.body.scrollHeight;

    }, 2000);

  })

}

function sendConnections(){

  var totalConnectionsSent = 0;

  for (let usr of arrUsers) {

      if (totalConnectionsSent >= numberOfUsers) {

        break;

      }

    usr.click();

    totalConnectionsSent += 1;

    }

  console.log(“FINISHED!”);

  console.log(“Sent ” + totalConnectionsSent + ” connections.”);

  console.log(“Developed by @Naulex (see me on BlackHatWorld forum)”);

  alert(“FINISHED!\n\nSent ” + totalConnectionsSent + ” connections.\nDeveloped by @Naulex (see me on BlackHatWorld forum)”);

}

//

// Here is the only change you have to do: Change the number 10 with the number of connections you want to do: 1, 10, 37, 2184… and press enter.

StartScript(10);

07.1 How to use script.

This example uses Iridium browser (Google Chrome based).

Go to: https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork

• Right-click on the area called “Recommended for you”. Then click on “Inspect”.

• On the right a box will open. At upper part of that is a tab named “Console”, click on it.

• Copy-paste one of these two scripts, mentioned in the title “Scripts” in the box after this icon: > , as shown on the screenshot. Then click on enter.

The script will start scrolling the page and clicking on “Connect”. Just wait until the amount set by you connections are being invited or the limit of invites gets full, depending on which script you used.

• When you are using 1^st script you’ll see that it’s sending out invites.

• When you are using 2^nd script you’ll see this. Just click on “OK”.

• If you have passed your invitations limit you’ll see this message. Click on “Got it”.

• Then, close the console from “X” and refresh the page so the script stops.

08. Twitter and further.

The reasons why we decided to use Twitter for our Social Media over the other apps are:

• Using Twitter Deck we can give access to Nodes so that they post on Ubinodes account.
• It’s easier to track who is following you back, that way you keep in balance the number of followers vs following. Additionally you can use fllwrs http://fllwrs.com/faq

By contrast, on Instagram you can’t see who’s following you back, you have to compare manually both lists, it’s not viable long-term, and Facebook is not for business.

1- Use a dedicated mobile android device. If so, install scrcpy: https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

Pro: You can keep in touch with your social media contacts on the move.

Con: Need another device. Not good for Communication Mantra as you may be interrupted by notifications all day long.

2- Use an android emulator. If so, install 32-bit version of Bluestacks or LDplayer: https://www.ldplayer.net/

You can use any other Android Emulator. LDplayer has two benefits:

– Contact app ready to be used. No need to download one.

– GPS location spoofing ready to be used.

Pro: No need to have another device. Best to protect your private data and avoid tracking as it will protect your IMEI, IP if using a VPN, no browser fingerprinting, no link to your personal accounts and contacts etc. Also best for Communication Mantra, you switch on the Emulator only when you want to work on your Social Media.

Con: Must have a computer to use it.

Step 1:

With Tutanota, create a free account. It will be used for creating Social Media accounts so as to avoid your own email to be the target of advertising and mass surveillance. It will also allow you to destroy this profile and create new ones regularly, again, to avoid being the target of mass surveillance and advertising. You will NOT give this email to people you meet through social media channels as we are using a shared email for everything Ubinodes. You will use this email only as credential for social media apps, and other short lived purposes, this email will be destroyed after some time.

Step 2:

Now it’s time to “inject” contacts into your social media apps. that way their algorithm is going to “suggest” your profile to people who are already on these apps. We have contact lists that we’ll give you. They are in CSV format and needs to be converted to VCF in order to be imported by the contact app. You can use the freeware csvtovcard for that.

Import all you contacts before setting up Apps, that way they’ll sync with thousands of contacts from the start.

08.1 Import in VCF.

Pro: Don’t need to create a Gmail account. Can start importing contacts immediately after you have launched the Emulator.

Con: Have to convert CSV into VCF.

• If you don’t have a contact app built in, see step_03.
• Shapr doesn’t use your contacts but your GPS position. Twitter and Linkedin do.
• If you use LDplayer you can import a bunch of VCF files at once into the contact app:

1- Import your VCF files into the emulator. By default they are going to be placed into /sdcard/Pictures

2- In the contact app, in the settings at the right hand corner, click on import/export, then select import from .vcf file.

3- It will take you to the file manager. Then at the right hand corner click on the three dots and select “Show internal storage”. This will allow you to navigate to the folder where you have all you VCF files.

4- Display the files in a list by clicking on the right hand corner on the icon showing tiles.

5- Click on the first file but keep your left click until the file is selected and it shows the ability to select more files.

6- Select all the VCF files and click on “open”, they’ll be imported into the contact app.

7- Once they have all been imported, remove them from the storage of the Android emulator, otherwise when you’ll be importing new files it’s going to get confusing. Remove them from the storage won’t remove the contacts from the apps.

08.2 Import CSV through Gmail.

If you don’t want to convert to VCF or want to import thousands of contacts at once, you can set up a Burner Gmail account. There is a user manual for that. The limit is 3000 per import for a total of 25000 contacts.

Note that you have to use Gmail’s template for the import process to work. Put your emails in the column E-mail 1 – Value.

Step 3:

Download Aurora and install it: https://auroraoss.com/

That way you won’t have to use Google Play and won’t have to create a Google account.

Using Aurora store, install:

– A contact app if you didn’t install LDplayer.

– Twitter.

– Shapr.

– Xing.

– Linkedin. Note that often Linkedin is blocking the account and forcing you to upload an ID. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft and part of the Prism programme.

– If on a mobile device, install an app to spoof your location, such as Hola Fake GPS.

Create accounts using your Ubinodes’ ID.

Spoof your location to make it into your own country/state if you want apps such as Shapr to connect you with people nearby. This is especially useful to connect with prospective clients.

If you want to find prospective clients or nodes in other countries, then you can also spoof your location to get “matches” in other places.

Step 4:

In the settings, allow all apps to synchronise with your contacts.

In Twitter this is under Settings -> Privacy and Safety -> Discoverability and contacts

In Twitter, after some time, you’ll be shown “suggestions” of people to follow. Click on the icon of your profile, it will open up a menu showing how many people you follow, click on this, it will take you to a page showing people you follow. At the top right click on the icon with a (+) to add people, it will make you suggestions of people to follow. In theory this is based on the contacts you’ve imported. Follow all of them, hopefully some will follow you back. It’s a number game, the more contacts you import, the more people you follow, the more will follow you back and know about Ubinodes. There is a limit to the number of people you can start following every day, so you have to do it regularly.

On your wall you’re going to end up with inappropriate posts and undesired ads. On each of them, click on “not interested in this tweet” and “I don’t like this ad”. Over time the algorithm will show you more relevant potential contacts.

As you’re following plenty of people in order to be followed back, from time to time look into the list of you follow, keep those who’ve followed you back and remove the others. That way over time you’ll be following mostly people who followed you back. And you’ll be able to keep following plenty of new people without ending up with too much of a gap between the number of people you follow and the number of people who follow you back.

After about one month, you’re pretty sure the apps have scavenged on all your contacts and shown you “relevant” suggestions. Export your contacts from Google in CSV so as to pass them to another Node or a client.

Import a new batch of thousands of contacts. And you’re back to Step 4.

09. Importing contacts to Google.

Although Google is generally unreliable an unsafe as a platform to conduct business, this section will offer some information on managing contacts in Google. Make sure to use a burner g-mail account as discussed above in the article.

09.1 First steps.

1. In order to cycle your contacts, you need to first delete all existing contacts.
2. Once done, empty the trash because otherwise these contacts will still count and you’ll get a notification saying you’ve reached your limit of 20k contacts when trying to import new contacts.
3. You’ll have to go into the trash and empty it several times as each time it will delete only a few thousands contacts, this will takes a few minutes to process.
4. When you import contacts they go under the “Labels”. They won’t show up as contacts until you manually select them and add them as contacts.
5. However, they will appear in the contact app on Android and Emulators, meaning that they can be used in social media apps as contacts without adding them to contacts in Google.

09.2 Tips.

• There’s a hard limit of adding 999 contacts at a time.
• When importing a list, give the label the name of the file you import. Otherwise Google will create its own names, and it will be harder to track which contacts you have used.

10. Creating a marketing strategy.

To develop an effective social media strategy marketers must build their strategies around their employees needs and wants. This will consume your time and resources to complete, but when done correctly you will have a more dedicated client base. To do this there are 6 key steps that you will need to follow to keep clients engaged. These steps include (1. Set realistic goals for yourself 2. Research your target audience 3. Decide what the most important metric you need to be aware of 4. Create engaging social content 5. Be on time with your social media response 6. Decide what’s working and what can be improved upon). As an effect of social networks becoming more widely used users/clients have changed the way they obtain news and information. Therefore, it is important to adapt the correct marketing strategy to reflect the changes in society. Our end goal for the use of social media is to better help potential clients understand Ubinodes practices and services

10.1 Set realistic goals for yourself.

It may seem unreal but it is incredibly possible to  develop a social media strategy that results in a dedicated community of clients. Your goals are important because they will dictate the time and energy spent in your campaigns. To start you want to tackle small objectives, such examples include starting a small forum of familiar people. As more and more people participate in the forum the chances that followers/clients become permanently connected to your network increases.

10.2. Research your target audience.

To reach your target audience you first want to find the most relevant social media platform that they engage with. For example, if you had wanted to target millennials then you would want to advertise on Instagram or TikTok since most of the user base are Millennials. If you had wanted to target women for your marketing campaign, starting a Pinterest account would be your best option since women frequently use the social media platform. Demographic data like the example above will help you find your target audience and once you find the correct platform you can start gathering important data of your own.

10.3 Decide what the most important metric you need to be aware of.

After you have collected the data associated with your target audience and have chosen a social media platform to start from, it’s now time to decide on what metrics are important for your end goals.  Three important metrics that I will focus on are reach, clicks and engagement because I feel that these are what drive a follower/client to become committed to your network. In social media terms, reach is the number of users who saw your post. This is an important metric because it lets you see how many people you are reaching with your content. Clicks matter in Social media marketing because they are a positive marker for determining if your content is being positively received by your audience. Engagement represents the total amount of people you reach by the number of clicks or likes you get from your content. By using all three of these metrics you will be able to quickly decide what content works and what does not work.

10.4 Create engaging social content.

Your social media content is a crucial part to the success of your marketing strategy. Once you have found a theme for your content that is positively received it is important to stick with this theme. By sticking to a consistent theme followers/clients can better understand your brand which in turn makes it easier for you to convey your message to your clients. A good example of this is if you display a banner before a post, users become used to this and should only change when there is a transition between viewership. 

10.5  Be on time with your social media response.

You instill integrity in your page or channel by being constantly active on posts and replies. 

Being engaged with your viewership will show that you respect the time of those who view your content. To better reach your viewership, you can study the data you collected in the previous steps to find out the best time to post commits and content. When a user gives a donation or asks for your services it is important that you respond to them as quickly as possible. Many followers/clients expect a quick response but also a meaningful reply to their decision to engage with you. By responding at the right time you can ensure that your social media strategy operates like a well oiled machine.

10.6 Decide what’s working and what can be improved upon.  

Over time you will be able to determine what is working and what needs to be improved upon. If your content stalls, look at your analytics and decide what needs to be changed. This is a process that will take time to master so do not panic if your first idea is not working. There is no perfect science to grabbing an audience’s attention and trial and error is a common strategy implemented by others. Peer feedback is a good method to find options and ideas that you can implement in your social media strategy.  

11. Conclusion.

When it comes to choosing the android emulator, Bluestacks and LDplayer seem to operate in almost the same fashion, but Bluestacks can be a little faster at times, and LDplayer comes with the contacts app and it is easy to spoof the GPS.

Although the 4 platforms listed above are all important, there are many other platforms out there we have not listed, and may be better for your company. Therefore, we encourage you to pinpoint your exact needs from a platform, use this article as a basis to understand the process of creating an online profile, but make sure to explore the uses and audiences of other platforms as well. From what we have seen above, the process of creating an online business presence is relatively the same from platform-to-platform, but it’s the smaller differences between their offerings that can “change the game” for your company.

12. Notes.

1. This is done to hide your IP which gives away your location and identity. You can purchase plenty of such services online, a good one would be Protonmail (https://protonvpn.com/about).
2. The non-expiry ability will depend on the country you live in because in countries like EU States or the US you cannot have a non-expiry card if you don’t register it. However you can generally register with dummy information. When you register online they ask you for identification details including ID or passport number but you can put dummy (fake) information. Make sure your VPN is connected before going to the website. If your provider doesn’t offer online registration nor non-expiry ability, just let the SIM expire and purchase a new one, that’s the cost of protecting its privacy.
3. Police, prosecutors etc. Their crimes are “legal” since they’ve corrupted state institutions. They are the most dangerous sort of criminals, to an individual or to a country. If they’ve done something illegal, they can cover it up any ways they like. They can intercept and read IMAP, POP3, TLS, SSL. They can spoof your email provider SSL certificate. They can have access to your SMS, emails, meaning a recovery option is often an easy attack possibility for them. That’s why you should always use encryption software, encrypt your devices, and buy hardware outside the country you operate.
4. Because if it has been used before with a SIM card under your name you can be identified .Why is that? Every GSM phone has a unique ID called IMEI which cannot be changed. The instant you put a SIM into it, the phone will send to the carrier the IMEI which will be tied to the SIM which is tied to your identity, now the IMEI is tied to your identity forever, it’s in the carrier registry which is shared with other carriers and state-sponsored criminals (3), you’re burned. Even if you change the SIM, you can be tracked by IMEI.
5. When syncing your contacts, Facebook will allow you to select only 50 contacts. So it’s of no use to upload a list of 10,000 contacts to get started with Facebook. However, there is after a very strong network effect, with many second degree contacts who are going to send you friend requests. In no time you’ll be friend with enough people to create a room « Ubinodes_xxx – International Marketing » and invite all these friends. The drawback is that since your friend list is built trough requests, you will be trapped in a bubble of similar profiles, same country or same interests. That’s of little use for our strategy. So with Facebook be prepared to create new accounts very often.
6. Reddit is asking you to link a Gmail account but it’s not sure if it’s syncing your contacts as it doesn’t seem to be « suggesting » you to anyone.
7. It is difficult to upload photos using an android emulator, it’s better to use an android device with scrcpy. When you create an event, the time displayed by the app is often wrong, so include the time in your title. When you create a group, give a descriptive name according to the actual context of your group. For example use “Club Export Burkina Faso” instead of “Ubinodes Burkina Faso”.
8. VK is syncing through connecting with your Gmail or Facebook account. It is not looking into your contact app.
9. Facebook has over 2.7 billion users. Since it has the highest amount of advertising, there is a higher chance that your marketing can be lost in the storm. It assists with maintaining a customer base, not creating one. Furthermore, Facebook is “pay-to-play” in terms of marketing.
10. Instagram is great for companies without an advertising budget
11. See this article: https://www.pushbio.io/why-doesnt-my-link-work-on-instagram/
12. Individual Twitter pages can be converted to business pages, but it’s recommended to start a fresh page.
13. Individual LinkedIn pages can be converted as well, but the process can be troublesome, and creating a fresh page seems to be a quicker process.

13. Sources.

• Choosing the platform: https://aofund.org/resource/choosing-right-social-media-platform-your-business/
• General social media information: https://www.createit.co.nz/blog/creating-engagement-in-an-environment-of-social-media-overload/
• More social media facts: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-8-best-social-media-platforms-to-market-your-business-in-2021-infograp/595834/
• Facebook facts: https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-demographics/
• Instagram statistics: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/
• Twitter statistics: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/
• LinkedIn statistics: https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-statistics-business/
• Making Facebook page: https://blog.hootsuite.com/steps-to-create-a-facebook-business-page/
• Making Instagram business page: https://business.instagram.com/getting-started
• Making Twitter page: https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/create-a-twitter-business-profile.html
• Making LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/710/create-a-linkedin-page?lang=en