Bot or Not?
If you want to find out if you are following bots in Twitter here is a project that lets you scan any public Twitter profile and checks the Twitter account for any human or bot-like behavior.
The criteria used are simple and it the methodology used is explained here.
Let’s check if my profile is human-like or bot-like below. As you can see, the reasons why Bot or Not think I am a human is because I retweet other users (I use the old school RT method), I also use dot replies to multiple users, I do reply to other tweeps, I use hashtags and I do not follow ridiculously large number of accounts.
One thing that Bot or Not doesn’t appreciate as a human-like behavior is tweeting lots of links. Most of my tweets have links because I share them on Twitter — with my comments. I think this tool does not consider what Twitter clients were used. Obviously if you are using Twitter client meant for broadcasting blog posts, it will be automated and will fall under bot-like behavior. What is not clear to me is how they score the bot-like tendencies — is scheduled tweets consider bot-like? The human factor should be weighted when you schedule a post or when you use Buffer app because you still have to do it manually. Flooding your Twitter followers, whether you space your tweets evenly or not, seems to be not considered in the methodology, or may it is considered but it is not mentioned. Nevertheless, I find this project interesting and I appreciate this tool very much.
Now let’s look at Techcrunch. It was used in the study to develop Bot or Not and it’s obviously a bot.
I also checked Lady Gaga’s Twitter profile and Bot or Not tells us it’s a bot but with human tendencies.
If you’re building a big number of followers, don’t you think that this tool proves that it one way to build big number follower is to follow this approach — use automation tool and support human-like behavior like retweeting and replying when appropriate. I know there are lots of strategies to help you grow Twitter followers and this tool supports most of what I’ve read so far.
