Things to consider when you make a bot on Twitter
With over 30 retweet bots on Twitter combining over one million retweets I’m probably the craziest one making these bots. While these bots are simple in nature there are a lot of things to consider while developing a retweet bot.
You look like less of a spammer if you have quality retweets
This is the most important rule to follow and one that most don’t. If you’re using some feed automated tweeting service like twitterfeed using an atom feed from search.twitter.com you loose all control over your retweets. Tweets with links must be ignored out to help your reputation and to avoid your bot being abused by spammers. Spammers will take advantage of your bots faster than you can clean up the mess.
You will also want to avoid retweeting people that purposely try to trigger your bot. You want spontaneity, not assholes looking to become popular through your bot. Log all of your retweets and limit each person a few per day.
Don’t retweet @replies or @mentions either. That just gets messy very quickly.
Allow “users” to opt-out
The purpose of a retweet bot is to be fun. If someone doesn’t see the fun in it I give them the option to opt out and go the extra mile of removing all retweets from that user. That’s all easily automated and makes people happy.
Log every retweet
Having a database of every retweet is very handy. Not only can you gather good statistics but you can try to hunt down spammers abusing your bots, or make fun lists with who you’ve retweeted the most. Keep a record of the username, user id, date/time, text, original tweet id and retweet id. Do this as early as you can and you won’t regret it.
Be original
No one wants to be hammered with retweets just because they said “balloon boy”. Do your homework and make sure there are no other bots looking for the same phrase you are. Don’t make a bot because of a fad like “pants on the ground” Oh and stay away from cursing bots. There are more than enough of those around right now.
Formatting your retweet
Right now you have two options. Either do an “old” retweet that follows the “RT @username: tweet tweet” format, or use Twitter’s new retweet function in the api. I used to do something like “(@username) tweet tweet” mainly because you save yourself a few characters. I switched to Twitter’s official retweet api method for a few weeks and regretted it ever since. Not every Twitter client has really integrated retweets in timelines. (btw: hurry up with Tweetie 2 for the mac, jeez!) Plus people check their mentions way more than retweets. Retweeting through the api means your tweet is 80% less visible and you want visibility.
Don’t follow people
Not much to be said about this. You can follow yourself to maybe gain yourself some followers, or to get feedback from people. But bulk following random or retweeted users is pointless. You follow people to read their timeline, not to pimp your account out.