How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter

This tutorial explains how you can easily make a Twitter bot that will automatically favorite and/or retweet tweets that contain particular keywords or #hashtags. You need absolutely no coding knowledge and your Twitter bot will be up and running in few minutes.

Before we get started, you may be wondering why would anyone write a twitter bot that mindlessly favorites or retweets tweets? Yes, bots are often used for spammy behavior but, if used right, they can also help grow your Twitter network. For instance, when people share a link from your website on Twitter, you can favorite that tweet and it will give an hint to the original poster that you are author of that page. A brand may like to retweet tweets that contain positive mentions of their product. The list goes on.

Also see: How to Write a Useful Twitter Bot

The first thing you need to do is define a search phrase and any matching tweets will be retweeted or favorited by the bot. Add as many search conditions as possible to keep spam tweets away from your list. Some examples:

1. Tweets containing links to your website, sans retweets
example.com min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5 -RT

2. Mentions of particular hashtag, but no links
#WhatAnAwesomeHashtag -RT -filter:links

3. All tweets sent from a particular location
#hashtag near:”New York, NY” within:15mi

OK, next we need to build our Twitter bot app. I suggest creating a separate Twitter account to test your automated bots.

1. Go to apps.twitter.com and create a new application. Fill in the mandatory fields (name, description, URL) and click the Create button. Next go to Keys and Access Tokens and click the Create my Access Token button. Twitter will generate the Consumer Keys & Access tokens that we will need in the next step.
2. Click here to copy the Twitter bot script to your Google Drive. Replace the search phrase and Twitter keys that were generated in the previous step.
3. Go to the Run menu and choose StartBot to initialize your Twitter bot.

That’s it. The bot will run in the background, every 10 minutes, and favorite / retweet matching tweets. It will fave/RT a maximum of 1 tweet per minute. If you wish to stop the bot later, go to Run again and choose StopBot.

Also see: How to Save Conference Tweets to a Spreadsheet

Use with care and, as always, the full source of the Twitter retweet bot is available on ctrlq.org under the “do whatever you like” license.

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The story, How to Create a Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 03/08/2015 under Twitter, Internet.