It never ceases to amaze me how many great applications spring forth online. [Makes mental note to self: visit Demo Girl more often!]. If you can think of it, it probably exists in some fashion online somewhere. At my ‘day job’, we had the desire to mirror Tweets from a live event simultaneously to our corporate Twitter account. Rather than forcing someone to filter through all the tweets and RT them, I looked for a tool to automate the posts. There were some great options to choose from. I just had to do some experimenting and find the best solution for us.
For folks who need to simultaneously post to multiple Twitter accounts from a single author, multiTwit seemed like a great application. multiTwit can be found at the Widgetropolis website. The application is actually an Adobe Air app and while spartan, it does exactly what you need for posting to multiple accounts with a single tweet. You’ll download the app and be up and running in minutes.
In our situation, our primary author was remote and Tweeting at an event from their mobile device, so it wasn’t practical to ask them to download an application on the fly with everything else they were doing. I began my hunt and found a great video tutorial of how to create an auto-retweet Twitter bot using Yahoo! Pipes by HyveUp. I am a newbie to Yahoo! Pipes and although the tutorial was great, it took me some finagling to get the feed functional. When I had my feed complete and tried to apply it, I kept getting some nasty 503 errors. After surfing through some user forums and posts, I discovered that getting a 503 error using this type of Twitter Bot was not uncommon. At this point, I was pretty frustrated. There was a live event that was going on in Europe that we were trying to leverage for some online exposure.
Finally, I tried out tweetbots. On their website, the headline reads, “Simple, Easy to Use…”. They’re correct. I wish I had landed here first, because it was incredibly turn-key. I was literally up and running in seconds. The Widgetropolis website has a few other small apps, including The Javascript Hand Grenade, which sounds like a lot of fun.
The event was a huge success. Lots of great re-tweets as well as some new followers. This little Twitter fire drill also proved to be a great learning experience for future events and integrating Twitter as a means of communicating with show attendees as well as for garnering greater online exposure.
