How To - Automate Status Updating on Twitter

Feb 19 2010

Have you ever wondered if you could automate your twitter posting? With WinAutomation you can! WinAutomation allows you to pull “tweets” from either a text file or an Excel spreadsheet and post them in Twitter based on a schedule. In this example, we are going to automate this specific task using a new action that has been introduced in WinAutomation v3: the "Download from Web" action.

The core component of this job is action no.6: "Download from Web". This action connects to the Twitter API and posts the first "tweet" from the text file. The properties of this action should look like this:

The variable %TweetList% contains a list. The first item of the specific list (which in this case is the first row of the text file) is %TweetList[0]% and it is the item that will be posted in Twitter.

Notice that you will have to enter the User Name and Password of your Twitter's account in the "Advanced" tab.

Now that we have created our job, we can create a "Schedule Trigger" so that it will run on a daily basis, at specific times. Right Click on the job in the console window and select "Edit Triggers". Then press the "Add new trigger" button and select the "Schedule Trigger". Your Schedule Trigger's properties will probably look like this:

After selecting "OK" in the dialog above, the Trigger List window will look like this:

You can also identify the presence of a trigger for the specific job, from the console window:


 

Attached you can find the job that you can directly import into WinAutomation ("File - Import Job" menu in WinAutomation's console window) and a sample text file that contains some "tweets". Notice, that the "Schedule Trigger" is already implemented in the job, so if you import it, the trigger will become active.

AttachmentSize
TwitterAutomationTextFile.waj17 KB
MyTweetsSample.txt364 bytes
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