So you want to attract attention to your twitter profile but you only post content x number of times a day so what do you do to keep your twitter account spewing out what looks like interesting content. Well what you do is set up a little twitter bot so that every time a news agency mentions certain key words it makes sure that you tweet it so that it looks like fresh content, only it doesn’t always work as this tweet shows.
Liverpool Library introduces 3M Cloud Library app sns.mx/VPlpy8
— Liverpool Daily (@LiverpoolDaily) July 5, 2012
I read the tweet and was interested in this piece of local news. The link took me to an interesting site with lots going on I thought WOW a new news site I had previously missed. But something wasn’t quite right it was to slick and there was no Liver Bird logo or Everton advertising banner. I played the video that looked slick and listened for the school age girls accent – this was the clincher it was not my city it was New Yorks Liverpool. To be honest I didn’t even know they had one and if so why aren’t we twinned with them.
So the moral of the story is “If your going to set up a Twitterbot be careful how you do it”
Take this one created by Adrian McEwen about the ships that enter the River Mersey aka https://twitter.com/merseyshipping As far as I understand it this works by taking the pinging data that the ships must send out as part of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) which is a collision avoidance system and Tweets certain elements.
This data is much better quality than could be achieved by a search Twitter bot.
All this said to whoever runs the Liverpool Daily Twitter account it is a dam good try.
