Thursday, 26 January 2012

Tricking Twitter “Bots” into Building Your Blog Stats




Pic courtesy Jenn and Tony Bot, Flickr

Bots are programs designed to perform a specific function on the internet and to work independently of human action once set up. Twitter bots largely provide information of certain types, in a variety of certain ways, on Twitter's interface. I'm being ridiculously vague in my explanation as I'm a writer, not a techie. Technology site Techmalaya explains much better than I could. They also provide a list of the different types of bots incorporated with Twitter.

On Twitter one day last year, I found one of my blog posts had been retweeted by Burroughsbot. This is a William S Burroughs-related “announcement bot”, RT-ing anything with the author's name to 2000 followers. I'd tweeted a particular post in which I'd discussed the surrealist penner of Naked Lunch and Junky.

Recently it occurred to me that I could purposefully get the same bot to retweet me again, only this time I'd link to my blog's home page. This way, whoever follows Burroughsbot will get my link in their Twitter feed and, provided they follow that link, they'll see my latest crazed musings. Genius!

I got a retweet within minutes.

The blog currently stands at 49,593 hits. Lets see if it jumps a little.

1 comment:

CageFightingBlogger said...

A day later and I'm on 50,183. I sure don't normally get 500 hits in a day. 100 on a good day. Have you had any success with Retweet Bots?