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