Auto Tweeting Random Tweets

The first twitter bot I created for a site was an ugly critter. It consisted of ~30 pre-constructed tweets that the cronjob would randomly go through. Some messages were double posted, some were too similar and it was just terrible. I didn’t track numbers but I’m wiling to bet I lost a lot of REAL followers because of it.

So this time around I wanted to mix in some more “random” message tweets with all of my auto generated ones. We’ve already talked about the search action tweets and I’ve mentioned posting categories and products. All of those drove traffic to the site, these random posts needed to come across as moderately conversational or at least human generated.

So I set about creating a set of 20 posts that were fairly generalized, not time sensitive and could be posted indefinitely. After 10 I realized I needed to have posts that were time sensitive or would at least expire at some point. Maybe even posts that I didn’t want to expire in a specific amount of time, but rather after they were posted a certain number of times.

So I constructed my table

Pretty simple – there’s no functionality for recurring time sensitive posts like holiday or seasonal messages but it could easily be expanded for that.

Once I filled in my posts I began querying. While I didn’t want the searches from the earlier post to repeat the same query more often than every 2 days I knew that I would need way more than 10 variations to have these comfortably repeat every two days. That’s where my buddy spinning comes into it.

Spinning Content for Exponential Variations!

Spinning gets a bad wrap. I like to think of it as a way to communicate a single thought randomly and exponentially. Any single message can be communicated 100 different ways, and the same goes for tweets. Here’s the function and syntax I use to spin with PHP

PHP Code for Spinning Content

<?php

function spin($content)
{   
    // replaces {{aa|bb|cc}}

    $pattern = '/\{\{([^{}]*)\}\}/si';
    preg_match_all($pattern,$content,$matches);
    for ($i=0; $i< count($matches[0]); $i++) {
        $search = explode("|",$matches[1][$i]);
        shuffle($search);
        $content = str_replace($matches[0][$i],$search[0],$content);
    }

    return $content;
}

$message = '{{Hello everyone|Hello|Greeting|Hey|Hey there}} my name is {{Terri|Terri Ann}}, I am a {{creative professional|web developer|photography enthusiast|cheeseburgler}} and today I will be {{educating you on spinning|showing you how to spin content|boosting your random tweet count}}!';

echo "Spin 1\n";
echo spin($message) ."\n";
echo "Spin 2\n";
echo spin($message) ."\n";
echo "Spin 3\n";
echo spin($message) ."\n";

?>

The first time I loaded the script the output was:

• Hey my name is Terri, I am a creative professional and today I will be showing you how to spin content!
• Greeting my name is Terri Ann, I am a web developer and today I will be boosting your random tweet count!
• Hello my name is Terri, I am a cheeseburgler and today I will be boosting your random tweet count!

With that string and 5 variations in the first set of {{}}, 2 in the next, 4 in the next and 3 variations in the last there’s a total of 120 (5x2x4x3) unique messages that can come out of that one entry. The best part is I didn’t have to write 120 different entries and when you mix that in with 9 other spinable messages most people will never notice the repetition. If I’d just added one more segment in the last set of {{}} there would have been 160 possible variations.

If there was ever a time to over test, it’s NOW

Be careful to do extensive testing with your spinner, when it fails, it fails badly. Watch to make sure you have your opening and closing {{}} all doubled up and that you aren’t posting un-spun content.
I think @shoemoney put it best in this tweet

Random Tweet Queue

Now back to picking the message! The query isn’t terribly complicate but there are a lot of AND’s to it SELECT * FROM random_tweets WHERE start <= NOW() AND (expire IS NULL OR expire >= NOW()) AND last_tweet <= DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 2 DAY) AND active ='yes' ORDER BY RAND LIMIT 1

If you have any tweets pass them through the spinner (yup, this is why we kept the tweet field text rather than varchar, so we can store the spinable version in the database) then tweet it!

Now just update the database, increment the times_tweeted by +1, update the last_tweeted = NOW() and if this post pushed times_tweeted >= max_tweets set the row to active = 'no'

I cannot write this SQL for you cause there are too many variables, you’ll need your language of choice (likely PHP) to help you make those decisions.

Tagged as: auto post, content, spin, spinning, twitter

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