Originally Published: January 2017

Social Helper is a tool that automates your social media profiles. Currently Social Helper can automatically retweet popular and recent items based off a set of Twitter search queries and a set of blacklisted queries. If you’d like to use it yourself follow the installation instructions on the Github Repo found here. I am currently using this to automate my personal Twitter account @charliejackson. Social Helper is built with the following technologies:

• The front end is built with React JS and Redux, compiled using webpack
• The front end is served with a NodeJS server using Express JS
• The backend is a basic PHP API
• Uses a standard MySQL database
• Docker is used to containerise the database, api and web parts, this also makes it super easy to deploy

Here is the brief I gave myself on the 16th of January 2016:

Social helper is my current project that I am working on until the 30th of January 2017. It is a tool that automates your social media profiles, as I am useless and keeping up with posting. I’m working on this for 2 weeks and have a few goals I need to achieve and some stretch goals that would be nice if I have enough time.

Critical Goals:

• Create a service that automatically retweets the most popular tweets given a twitter search query
• The time a tweet should get sent out is based on a user specified cron
• Multiple user accounts should be able to use the service
• Multiple search queries should be given for one account, and be evenly tweeted about
• The service should make sure it doesn’t tweet the same thing, or tweet too much from the same user

Stretch Goals

• The service should be managed through a web interface
• The service should track the amount of followers on the Twitter account every day, so it can measure effectiveness of posting
• Each Twitter user should get a weekly performance report so they can adjust their settings

The current work I am doing on this project is part of a bigger idea that I may come back to from time to time. The bigger idea would be a more developed service including features like:

• Integrating with your website to suggest or automatically share old and new content
• Connecting to your personal photos, scanning through them, and suggesting things to put on Instagram/Pinterest
• Also a service that does this by looking through your project folders
• Finding and suggesting conversations you should interact with on Twitter in real time
• Automatically adjusting what to Tweet/Retweet based on the performance of past tweets