Twitter Auto-Response is a program designed to streamline customer and company social media interactions while still providing quality service. Consumers gain value through faster and more frequent responses to their inquiries. Companies profit from the ability to track and collect information, and more importantly, create a satisfied customer. By bringing companies and customers closer together through communication, Twitter Auto-Response helps to deliver the best possible product.
Auto-Response was built around Twitter's streaming API in Python and controlled via a PHP/SQL web app. Although the program is light weight, using Python allowed us to have the program respond to tweets in real time.
As always, elusive syntactical errors (trying to use 'match' as a column name in SQL) soaked up hours here and there. We were able to minimize damages by focusing strictly on the MVP, knowing that we could always build up later when we had our platform finished.
We were delighted to complete the base of our program. Much easier said then done at hackathons.
Auto-Response can be easily expanded in a plethora of ways. Despite PHP's good support, I would consider switching the backend to the more popular Ruby on Rails. We defined specific methods in the auto response script where more advanced tweet detection and reply generation programs can be inserted. Also, our use of a SQL database alongside the Python script allows users to collect and organize the endless amounts of twitter data however they see fit to allow for even better responses.
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