In our Viral Marketing series, we talked about bots. But a few people have asked what is a bot?
Quite simply a bot is a program that automatically does a set of actions for it’s user. It’s named such as in “Robot” -> “bot” for short.
A lot of times with social media accounts, the actions one take are always the same. Sometimes people might want to retweet everything that is tagged with #freakyfriday. Or when someone follows them, they will automatically send a thank you message. These types of actions can be handled by a bot. Bots are useful when one has a lot of followers.
Where can I get my own Twitter bot?
Well there are a number of websites selling programs for twitter bots and such. These are generally frowned upon by Twitter since they want people behind accounts, not bots. But depending on your needs a bot can be pretty useful.
Many social media account managers now include autoresponders. These you can set up to automatically respond with a thank you or some message each time a users follows you.
Other advanced features include list curation, adding members and other functions.
Google “twitter bot” to find a list.
More on this topic later.
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