SMM Guru - The Social Media Marketing Guru » Twitter

Twitter Bot Script – A Full Blown Bot Package

Tyler — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:26:05 +0000

A few months ago I did a post about how to make a Twitter bot with php. The post is currently ranking number one for making a Twitter bot and I was getting tons of emails on tyler.tc on how to make the script more functional, and basically just do more. I put some ideas down and sent them to a few friends and got a great response. After putting some code together and releasing it online, TwitterBotScript or “TBS” has become a hit.

The reason being: Its simple to use, its constantly evolving, it allows you to expand your Twitter account (and marketing efforts) extremely fast, and its FREE. Think of TBS as an open source twitter bot script. Not only can you download it but its easy to build on with your own ideas and a little PHP experience.

Twitter Bot Script comes with what has been dubbed the TBS Toolkit, lets look at some features:

Full GUI tweet management including “Show Status” which allows you to pause that tweet from appearing in your activities.
Import tweets via a CSV file with the ability to set their status and type on the fly.
Create globally used tweets, or create special tweets to be used only for replies and direct messages.
The Mention Reply Tool will allow you to see all the recent @your tweets and automatically respond to them using the bulk responder option, or quickly write up a custom response. TBS will also keep track of the tweets you respond to so you don’t continually send duplicate responses like with other bot scripts.
The Make Friends Tool is another awesome tool only available from TwitterBotScript. This tool will give you a bunch of new ways to make friends on Twitter. Account sourcing will allow you to randomly follow users from your friends or followers (toggle) while allowing you to reselect the target, and the required amount of followers for each person you try to follow on the fly. You can also find new friends via keyword searching, or by directly inputting lists of user names.
TBS of course includes a status update tool that works just like your Twitter homepage.
Sleep Mode will allow you to randomize the time at which your tweets appear on Twitter. When you automate with CRON, your script is run at the same time interval every time. By using sleep mode, the script will essentially sleep for a random amount of time making your tweeting look more natural to Twitter users.
Tweet counter. So lets say you don’t have a larger number of tweets to work with and you don’t want to keep repeating them. You can globally set a tweet limit in TwitterBotScript limiting the number of times each message can be used.
API Rate Limiting integration.

Another bonus is Twitter bot script requires almost nothing to run... A basic installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and cURL of course) will do the job. But you will need CRON in order to use automation. In the next release, Twitter Bot Script will have a synthetic version of CRON like what WordPress uses.

Twitter Bot Script has been installed 598 times since it was released four days ago. I think with a little push Twitter Bot Script could easily become the king. I looked around today at the competition and most of the stuff out there is either very basic or very expensive. This puts Twitter Bot Script at a distinct advantage as users get an advanced tool set that is constantly seeing additions and revisions, for free. Yeah, there is definitely work to be done but that’s the point. As I get more and more emails for I’ll know what direction to move in.

So go download Twitter Bot Script and play around with it. You don’t have to be marketing your Micheal Jackson t-shirts to have fun with Twitter Bot Script. Its great for easily finding new friends and exposure.

Also: If your handy with PHP and working with APIs, shoot me an email if your interested in working on this project.

Top 20 Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter

Tyler — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:33:04 +0000

Enough is enough, there are tons of SEOs, affiliate marketers, and online gurus talking the talk but there are few who walk the walk in this industry. Through various lists I have put together the best entrepreneurs on Twitter. Personal views need not apply, these people made this list because they know their shit, and most likely will be able to teach you something.

Guy Kawasaki- Has authored numerous books and he contributes a
monthly column to Entrepreneur Magazine. Guy is also a top entrepreneur, blogger, and venture capitalist.
Rand Fishkin – CEO of SEOmoz, a Seattle based Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm. At 29 years old, Rand is a great example to young entrepreneurs.
Dave Snyder- A leading expert in search and social media marketing. He is a Co-Founder of Search and Social.
Jay Neely- Boston-based entrepreneur working on a news-related startup.
Rajesh Pancholi- Owner and operator of R27 Creativelab—a creative UK studio.
Sean Lindsay- Technologist, Entrepreneur, Builder, Creator, Connector.
Marcelo Calbucci- Founder and CTO of Sampa. Moved to the US in 1998, and now runs his own business.
Beverly Davis- Runs a cosmetic company with uplifting, motivating, and inspiring products.
Chris Pund- A young entrepreneur running 2 web-based companies. Also, manages a blog for young entrepreneurs.
Jeremy Schooley- Internet marketer and young entrepreneur. COO at Digital Labz.
Thomson Chemmanoor- A social media marketing expert from Houston,TX. Founder of Digital Labz.
Maiken Jepsen- Designer, work-at-home-mom, and owner of custom boutique clothing shop.
Blaine Moore- Operates a coaching and publishing business in the running and fitness niche.
Daniel McClintock- Graphic designer, entrepreneur, internet marketer, and business owner.
Wes Wilson- Founder of IncSpring, a social marketplace for designers and entrepreneurs.
Sumaya Kazi- Founding and Executive Director of The Cultural Connect. Recognized by Business Week as one of the top young entrepreneurs.
Joann Sondy- Entrepreneur since 2000. Owner of Creative Aces, a design and digital imaging studio.
Daniel Kehoe- Consultant for entrepreneurs that need a temporary/freelance CTO and blog.
Rick Myers- Founder/CEO of Talent Zoo, an online database where marketing and communications firms connect with talent.
JeanAnnVK- Entrepreneur, blogger, author, and social media consultant, among other things. The “Edgy Entrepreneur.”

Are you an entrepreneur on Twitter and think you belong on this list? Post a quick comment about yourself, your background, and your Tiwtter user name and if you fit the mold (or break it…) you can join the list.

How To Track Your Buzz or Brand On Twitter

Tyler — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:32:28 +0000

One of the odd things people seem to have a problem with is tracking their buzz on Twitter. So, I figured I will take all the guess work out of it and give you an easy way to do it. When it comes to marketing a brand on Twitter, this is something you must be able to do and its actually very easy. Just keep in mind that regardless of what results you end up with, you need to keep tweeting and building your account before real results are possible.

Lets take a look at this technique. All you need for this is Twitter’s own search engine at search.twitter.com. By using the Boolean search features mixed with a few of Twitter’s search operators we can construct a query to see all the tweets that mention your name, but keep out tweets that where made by you.

The Query: smmguru OR “tyler colwell” -from:smmguru

This will show me all of the tweets containing my username or real name on Twitter. Once you have the query set up to our liking you could even take your monitoring a step further and build some type of widget to aggregate the RSS feed from the Twitter search into… something like your Wordpress dashboard. Over all this will just give you a much better idea of all the mentions you are missing in your regular usage.

Another great use for this technique is finding new people to build into your community. A lot of the people you find in your search could be those who are not yet followers. By replying to them and following those that you like they will most likely return the favor as they have already come into contact with your content (at least on Twitter.)

Expanding On TwitterBot – Keep Track of Used Tweets

Tyler — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:30:48 +0000

Now that you know how to make a Twitter bot you may be looking to add some more functionality to it. One problem you may run into after some time is that you keep recycling or re-sending the same messages to Twitter. For example, you have 100 facts about your self and you don’t want any of them to appear twice but you want everything to be automated. How do you do this? Easy, just add a status field to your `tweets` table.

Step 1 – Add the field.
To add the field you can use the simple graphical interface in phpMyAdmin or use the SQL tab (or alternative) to run this code:

ALTER TABLE `tweets` ADD `status` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL;

What this will do is create a new field in your tweets table with 10 characters of space for that messages status. We will be setting them all to “ready”, and later changing our PHP code to update them as we go along.

Step 2 – Set all tweets to ready.
After you have the new field added to your database you will need to set all of the tweets you want to use to ‘ready’ status. In this example, only tweets with the status set to ‘ready’ can be randomly selected.

While inside of phpMyAdmin (SQL tab) or what ever tool you use, go to the page that allows you to run MySQL commands on your tables and enter this code:

UPDATE `tweets` SET `status` = ‘ready’

Alternatively you can pick which ones you want to use if you already have some tweets that you wish not to recycle. This SQL command will update every tweet/message you have in your database so use it wisely.

Step 3 – Modify PHP to update tweet status in database.
Our third an final step is to modify the php script so it will change the status of every used tweet. To do this, we will make a few simple changes to our original code.

First off, we have to change the MySQL query so it will only pull random messages with “ready” status:

$result = mysql_query (“SELECT * FROM tweets WHERE status = ‘ready’ ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1);

For our second change, we will need to get the ID number of the tweet from the database and pass it to the sendTweet() function we will modify in a moment:

while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$tweet = “$row[tweet]“;
$tweetID = “$row[id]“;
sendTweet($tweet, $tweetID);
}

Then we modify our sendTweet() function to handle the tweet’s ID, and then change its status if the message is successfully sent to Twitter:

function sendTweet($msg,$idoftweet){
$username = ‘TWITTER-USER-NAME’;
$password = ‘TWITTER-PASS’;
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$msg”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer)) {
echo ‘fail’;
} else {
echo ’success’;
mysql_query(“UPDATE `tweets` SET `status` = ‘used’ WHERE id = ‘$idoftweet’”);
}

Now it’s all ready to role. Now every time a message is pulled from the database and sent to Twitter (successfully) it will have it’s status changed to “used” taking it out of the possible messages to send. Just upload your new php file, re-activate your CRON job and have some fun.

How To Make A Twitter Bot With PHP In Five Minutes

Tyler — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:41:28 +0000

There are quite a few uses I could think of for an automated Twitter bot that posts new tweets for you throughout the day. While this sounds like it would be a hard task it’s actually quite easy and a great project for anyone who wants to learn how to use the Twitter API within PHP. Lets get started.

Step 1 – Create your database.

When creating your database there are a number of things you may want to think of ahead of time. For the sake of making things easy I chose to tone down the code I use and show you how it works. We will create a simple table to store all of the random tweets in.

CREATE TABLE `tweets` (
`id` INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`tweet` VARCHAR(140) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

Run that SQL and you should have a new “tweets” table in your chosen database. Notice how we limited the `tweet` field to 140 characters as well so we don’t have tweets that are too long to appear on Twitter.

Step 2 – Create the PHP to send the tweet.

The next step is to create a php script that will randomly select one of your tweets, and then send it to your Twitter account via Twitter’s API. While this sounds complicated, its very easy to do.

mysql_connect(“localhost”, “USERNAME”, “PASSWORD”) or die(‘Could not connect to database’);
mysql_select_db(“DATABASE”) or die(‘Could not select database’);
$result = mysql_query (“SELECT * FROM tweets ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1″);
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$tweet = “$row[tweet]“;
sendTweet($tweet);
}
function sendTweet($msg){
$username = ‘TWITTER-USER-NAME’;
$password = ‘TWITTER-PASS’;
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$msg”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer)) {
echo ‘fail’;
} else {
echo ’success’;
}
}
?>

Not to bad right? Our custom sendTweet() function pretty much takes care of all the dirty work in sending the message to Twitter. Just make sure you edit the code with your password and username for Twitter, and the MySQL login. Once you have your database populated you are all good to go and test the script to see if it works. Just upload it, run it, and you should see either “fail” or “success” on your screen.

Step 3 – Automate with CRON.

After going to Twitter and checking your account to confirm everything is copacetic, it’s time to let your monster loose. Depending on what host you use, CRON access may or may not be available to you. Luckily for me I am hosted with MediaTemple so this is not a problem.

Script Location - When using CRON you normally want to upload the file being run into a folder that nobody has access to from the web (root). After you have it in this location, just plug it into CRON with ‘php’ in front of it. Example: php /home/user/root/TwitterBot.php
Set The Time - I don’t think I have ever used a control panel that required you to manually enter the time format… I’m pretty sure most people use cPanel which also has drop downs to select when you would like the script to run. I like to run my Twitter bot every 25 minuets or so to keep my Twitter account fresh.

That’s it! Not to hard right… If you have any in-depth questions on the code or need help, feel free to leave a comment. Also leave one if you have usage ideas, new features that could make the script better. As you can now see, this is a valuable tool to have in your chest.

UPDATE 5/8/2009

I have released a full blown version of the script packed with features and a complete backend GUI. This has proven to be a great Twitter marketing too! Unlike all the others, I support mine and its not a billion dollars. Check out the site for all the details.

Get Twitterbotscript now!

How To Find Your Twitter Influence Level

Tyler — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:23:49 +0000

I did a post not to long ago on Twitter Grader and I must say this tool blows it out of the water. twInfluence gives you information that is actually interesting such as your network reach, veloticty, acceleration, and more from your Twitter account. Over all it help you show what type of influence you have in the Twitter network.

While more and more people start to realize the power of Twitter when you get an audience, tools like this will be even more usefull. Looking at it from a sales standpoint it would be an added bonus to tell your clients you have a 1 Million plus user reach on Twitter. Having real stats like this when doing consutancy is a bonus when it comes to social media.

Here are some other cool feature that would be nice to have. Whether or not these are all possible for a third party service I don’t know but it would be cool.

Active Followers - Check the followers to see who is active, and who has not updated in months.

Link Tracking - It would be nice to see how many times a shared link appears across your network.

Spam Buster - Another idea would be a feature that checks the users of your network for common signs of spam and displays a warning about those users.

Geographic Features - A nice Google Maps mashup would be nice… Show all of your network that has their location set, on Google Maps.

If you have any ideas on features, or use of the tool leave a comment. I feel like a smmGuru Twitter tool is on the way for my readers.