How to Automatically Tweet the Top Product Hunt Every Day
If you’re a fan of Product Hunt like I am, you may want to show your followers the latest product to hit the top spot. You can be sure the top Product Hunt will be something cool so there is no risk in automatically tweeting it.
Quick disclaimer, this ‘how-to’ uses Flutter which I built. If you’re new to Flutter, in a nutshell, it scrapes content from anywhere on the web and tweets it for you on a recurring schedule.
I’m going to show you how to use Flutter to automatically tweet the top Product Hunt daily. I plan to do a few of these posts for different sources. If you’re interested, please subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when they’re published.
One thing to keep in mind, the top Product Hunt can take the whole day to rise to the top. We want our auto tweet to go out near the end of a Product Hunt day which I believe is midnight Pacific Time (PST). We’ll use this information later on.
If you’d rather watch a quick screencast of this process, see the video below:
Otherwise, let’s get started.
Step 1 — Install Flutter Selector
To get data from a web page, Flutter needs something called a CSS selector. You are going to need a unique CSS selector to set up this tweet. In particular, we need the unique CSS selector for the title of the top Product Hunt.
There are lots of different ways to get a CSS selector. To make it as simple as possible we’ve built a handy point and click bookmarklet.
So, to extract the CSS selector for top Product Hunt, install Flutter Selector by dragging and dropping the install button into your bookmarks bar.
Step 2 — Start Flutter Selector on Product Hunt
Now that we have the bookmarklet installed we can extract the CSS selector from Product Hunt. Browse over to Product Hunt and start Flutter Selector by clicking on the bookmarklet link.
Step 3 — Select the Top Product Hunt
With Flutter Selector started we can hover over elements and click to get the unique CSS selector. Hover over the title of the top Product Hunt of the day and click.
Step 4 — Copy the CSS Selector
On clicking the element, you will be presented with a prompt. In this prompt, the CSS selector for the element you just clicked will be highlighted. All you need to do is CTRL + C (Windows) or CMD + C (Mac). Or alternatively right click the text and select ‘copy’.
Step 5 — Input the Source
Once we have the CSS selector we can set up our automatic tweet.
This is where you’ll need a Flutter account. You can sign up/login with your Twitter account here. Once in, choose to create a new recurring tweet.
In the new recurring tweet form, enter the Product Hunt URL (http://www.producthunt.com/) and the CSS selector we just extracted (.post-item — text — name).
Step 6 — Compose Tweet Format
Once we have the source of our dynamic content nailed, we can format our tweet.
Position the tag {{dynamic_content}} wherever you want the Product Hunt title within the tweet. Position the tag {{short_link}} wherever you want the short link (link to the Product Hunt page) to be within the tweet.
Be creative with the rest. However, remember to leave enough characters for the dynamic content and short link. Otherwise, the dynamic content will be truncated with ‘…’.
Step 7 — Set Recurring Schedule
When and how often do you want to tweet this? With Flutter, you can set hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly recurring schedules. Product Hunt is a daily aggregator so it’s probably best to go with daily for now.
Remember that the top Product Hunt can take most of the day to rise to the top. So it’s best to tweet out nearer the end of the Product Hunt day. I’ve set my recurring schedule to 11pm Pacific Time (PST) which will pretty much guarantee the Top Product Hunt. Choose whatever time of day works best for you.
Step 8 — Create Auto Tweet
That’s it! Click on the ‘Create Recurring Tweet’ button and your tweet will be set up and ready to go. It will automatically scrape the top Product Hunt daily at the time you specified in your schedule, insert it into your tweet format, and tweet it out. 😎
Why Recurring Tweets?
Vic Maine, one of our first users has been taking advantage of this exact recurring tweet.
He regularly gets favourites and re-tweets from influential tweeple!
One last thing.
Flutter makes it really easy for you to help others set up this recurring tweet. Once created, a recurring tweet has a quick set up link that you can share.
This link will direct anyone to the Flutter tweet form with all the inputs filled in (after sign up/login). All they have to do is click create! Here is our embedded link for this example:
Automatically Tweet the Top Product Hunt Every Day
We’re building a showcase of popular recurring tweets, please check it out if you get a chance. Recommendations for dynamic data sources always welcome.
Happy Flapping!
Don’t let your Twitter feed go stale! Use Flutter to automatically tweet relevant dynamic content on a recurring schedule.
