PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Twitter “bots” are machines that automatically post and retweet comments based on particular keywords and links. Although bots are good at their jobs, they’re notoriously impersonal, and people with any Twitter savvy can quickly spot a machine. But now, researchers have created a more sophisticated and personable bot that could help automate Twitter interactions.
Called a “social bot,” the tool stemmed from the work of the Web Ecology Project, a social media research group. The project started when the group began to question social media consultants, employees whom companies hire to help increase a brand’s social media presence.
A visualization of how the social bots promoted human-to-human connection. Humans are in blue, with the bots in green.
“A lot of people you can hire now say they are really good at community engagement," Tim Hwang, one of the researchers, told "Technology Review."The teammates asked themselves, "Can we measure those claims?"
As an experiment, the researchers set up a contest to see who could get the most replies from users on Twitter. It’s no surprise that some of the tech experts immediately set up bots to do the work for them.
After the social bots were successful in the experiment, Tim Hwang and two others started the Pacific Social Architecting Corporation to continue studying the bots. With this new organization, the research team also studied how humans interacted with bots and how bots could help forge human-to-human relationships.
The team tracked the interactions of 2,700 Twitter users and nine social bots. Bots were able to retweet messages and promote human-to-human interactions by mentioning different users in tweets. Bots led to a 43 percent increase in followers when compared to a control in which no bots were used.
Social bots like these might be a great option for businesses, especially startups without the budgets for social media experts. By tweeting and retweeting industry news and information, social bots could help companies gain followers and fans in an efficient yet friendly manner.
Click here to read a research paper by the team about their social bot technology.
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