My Twitterbot
Up to recently I haven’t gotten much into this micro blogging craze, nor really into any of the social networking variations. Apart from using Facebook to run our group for EC Offroad Adventures which inform people of our upcoming events, and keeping in touch with friends I normally see often anyways, it really hasn’t made an affect on me to want to use it more.
I know Norio from Maxiware uses Facebook’s advertising feature intensely with great success, so perhaps there is something of an untapped avenue for me.
He is also the one that got me onto twitter. Now admittedly, I don’t find it at all appealing to twitter the whole day about what I’m doing, but what I do find interesting is that this is another avenue of generating traffic to your website. I have a number of websites I’ve put up, just as a test and experiment most of the time. Some can be viewed at http://www.cmcs.co.za/websites. Sometimes I get an idea in my head, and then I see if I can turn it into a website. Most of the time though, I don’t spend much time after that actually promoting the website and getting visitors there. Big mistake I know.
Okay, back to twitter. So the whole thing with twitter is that you can write updates to your profile using 140 characters or less. Most people use it for stuff like, “Chris has just gotten back from the bank”, “Chris has just gotten off the phone with a stupid client”, or “Chris has just launched a new website, check it out at http://www.cmcs.co.za/websites”. You see what I mean? If you’re familiar with Facebook’s status updates, it’s basically that. Now people that are following you will see these updates in whichever program they’re using to view twitter updates of their friends.
The theory I have, is that the more people are following you, the more people are likely to see your updates. How do you get people to follow you? You can either be very interesting, or you can read another theory I have. If I were to randomly start following 100 people on twitter, chances are that some of them will actually then follow you as well. So I tested it by randomly following people on twitter. Within a few hours I had about 3 followers. Not bad, 3 people to potentially see my updates.
I, however, don’t have the time to sit here each day clicking away following people. So my mind start working over time to think of a way to automate this. I see a Developers link on twitter’s homepage, and lo and behold, they have an API. This is just a way for our little programs to interface with their software. It allows me to search for people on twitter, follow people, and make status updates. Perfect!
That was the start of my Twitterbot.
I have a list of predefined tags that it uses to search for people making status updates about those tags within the last hour. Say for instance everyone with the word #website in their status. I put the list of all those users into my database table. This is run once a minute every day. Then, 3 times an hour I randomly select 1 person from that list, and follow them. This is the important part of my bot, it collects users for me to follow. I do it at 3 per hour, so that I don’t start following more than 36 people a day, just to not cause suspicion.
All that was left was to integrate my websites with twitter. So for instance, when I make a post to http://www.whatifound.co.za/ it automatically updates my status for http://twitter.com/stuffwhatrocks/. The same with http://www.pichost.co.za/, whenever a new picture gets uploaded, it updates the status. It has boosted traffic to my sites a bit, but this is a long term experiment. In total I am now following 1,195 people, and out of those people 202 are following me. 202 potential visitors to my site. My database of names contains more than 15,000 users at this point in time, and growing by the minute.
Worth the effort of making a twitterbot? I think so. It took me about 3 hours to research and make this, and it will now steadily grow the traffic to my websites.
After doing this, and having it running for a few days, I decided to research a bit more about automating twitter. I then found similar bots to mine all over the Internet. And here I thought I was special 
If you’d like to read more about the Twitter API, check this out http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation
