Welcome to this session. Um I'm very excited to share my experiences and knowledge with you. Also, if you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to state them into the chat. I will do my best to following them and answering them.Also, you're very welcome to share your linkedin your Twitter accounts to connect afterwards. So um some words about me, um my full name is Rico, but I go with just Rica normally internationally because it's such a complicated German name. So um yes, I'm from Germany, Berlin to be exact. And I'm working as a full stack web developer at IAV, which is an automotive engineering company quite big here in Germany. I'm also an open source contributor for various projects and um I'm a lecturer. So I give talks and workshops for women who'd like to start coding and would like to switch into a tech career and the love sharing my knowledge with others and get connected to other devoted tech women. So please let's connect afterwards. I'd be very happy to do that. So, um what's this session all about? Basically, I show you how I build a social media bot that supports women and tech and how you could do as well. Besides that, we will cover um what bots actually are, why you could use automated interactions in your social media accounts and what might be the difficulties doing that? How do I know? Um Well, I'm the creator and maintainer of a Twitter account that that's called FM tag.

Don't forget the underscore in the end. Um You can have a look at it right now if you would like and dig into its feet, it's um probably the biggest automated account that supports women in tech and shares the stories and has gained 21,000 followers until now. I have founded it as a totally nonprofit fund project and I started it during a coding challenge actually, which I can recommend very much. Um Yes, and its aim has always been to amplify women's voices and tech, get them connected and do good for the community. So what is special about this account is probably that it's bought? So I don't publish any original content or very rarely, I don't follow back normally. And um it's really based on pure retweeting. So despite of that many people, not only women, many people find this very interesting and inspiring, which um um is a very good thing. So how does it work? The bot retweets content? So also your content, if you're tagging your content with specific hashtags, for example, women in tech girls who code women who code women in stem something like that some more and then it gets into the Femtech feed and will be spread to its followers. So what's going on in the community? What do people share and what do the but or what does the bot share a show is something and I show you content which I like the most.

So here we have, for example, um achievements of women in our community who are doing research, did a great job or have been promoted something like that. Um We have stories of the past um often shared during celebration days like this one about Mary Sherman who got the US into space in the sixties. Um Other content the bot shares is just empowerment in any way or also announcements of events, podcasts, talks, conferences where great women participate, also job offers, um calls for papers, anything like that and also just personal stories from women of our community. So content from just all over the world as long as it's in English, um which makes its content very diverse, which is a great thing about the bot feed. I think um You could also ask um if those people who follow FTE actually interact. Um Yes, they do. They uh get into interaction like following each other discussing liking each other's tweets. And um that's what the board actually is about networking, socializing support in any way, which comes to the question if is building a board or using automated interactions in your social media accounts.

Uh a good idea for you or your business or your organization, I think, yes, it is if you are able to deal with some odds and that's where the slightly unpleasant side of bots come in. So when you are scrolling through FEX feed, you might sometimes see shady tweets that don't really seem to fit into the other content. And this is because unfortunately there are spammers at Twitter and of course, on any other social media platform out there who love to make use of popular hashtags and accounts. So what are they trying to do? They take their unrelated stuff with any trending hashtags and know that there are bots out there like FTE that will consider retweeting their content. This is called hashtag cramming and it's actually forbidden by Twitter, but they try it anyway um through that behavior. They, yeah, they try to place themselves into Femtech feed um and try to be seen by a lot of people and I've um collected some of the content I don't really appreciate at fete uh feed. And this is something like that. Many spammers try to place their advertising. Sometimes I think advertising is uh kind of acceptable if it's for computer equipment or girl nerd T shirts or online workshops, something like that. But for um non technical products like this, this is not at all acceptable in Fex feet.

So um this is some retailer who tries to, obviously tries to sell some clothes. I don't know. Um We have, as I said, a lot of advertising, like people who try to sell their um, ghostwriting here, we have these real estate guys who take their tweet with women in STM and try to, you know, place their stuff at um Femtech feed totally unrelated to women in tech. Obviously. Um Unfortunately, we have people who try to amplify uh whatever topic, share their political religious views um that are totally unrelated to women in tech, in tech topics. Also anti feminist, racist trolls in any way. Um who tried to abuse bots like Femtech also just bought people that trigger retreats for just their nonsense content. I've seen it all. I have to say what we can do about that. Um That's a point, a point I will discuss a little bit later. But for now, let's take a little step back and try to clarify one thing. What is a but actually in some about is an automated account. Nothing more or less. That's what Joel Roth head of site integrity at Twitter says. And what he means is that an account at Twitter or any other social platform that has mostly or only automated interactions is considered a bot. I think bots can be the absolute worst part of social networks when they are being unnerving and untrustworthy.

And there have also been cases you probably heard of them where bot networks aggressively engaged in political affairs, something like that. But they can also be a very good thing. So let's start with the good parts of bots. First bots we um usually like or sometimes don't even identify as bots um act in a way that don't bother us. Of course. So whenever building a bot you should either do good to the community or to the world even, or make use of them and grow your business in a kind way. So I've got some nice examples of very kind, very useful, even funny bots here. Um There's the way back but I like a lot because it posts uh screenshots of very old uh old fashioned websites from the internet archive. I love that. There's the great art bot which does art um with artificial intelligence and tweets this or there's the earthquake bot which automatically shares or earthquake alerts from all over the world at Twitter, which is a great, great thing. And of course, Fick, um but if you'd rather like use bot technologies for your business, you can do that as well in multiple ways. Um As long as you stick to the Twitter rules of, of course, and um they are a bit strict for bots actually.

So have, have a look into the guidelines at Twitter. Um And just to, just to name a few ways to grow your business through bot technologies, um You could boost your social media engagement, for example, by order following order, retweeting your followers, you could provide first level support to your customers and send automated direct messages or auto respond to direct messages.

You could automate your repetitive tasks and auto tweet every article you publish or every podcast episode you publish and you can set up a publishing schedule. So you don't have to care for your Twitter feed manually, but to automate one thing or two here. So just one last hint from me for me to you stay human whenever you use bo technology to boost your brand. And especially um if you want to boost your brand, only automate those processes that require no or almost no engagement um or interactions from your site because your followers reactions may, may flip through. So if you want to build trust and loyalty with users, you can just automate everything. Of course, you will still need to engage regularly and listen to your customers, of course. So finally, to the technical side of building a bot how you can build a board yourself. Um There are actually two ways uh doing that. You can either use an automation tool. Um Those are mostly commercial ones and there are a lot of um there are a lot out there. So I listed just some of them here. They are automation tools for every social network you can think of and um almost any interaction you could think of. So scheduling your posts, um You can automate your follower handling and your messaging and you can of course build a bot yourself as I did.

So if there are some developers here, um this is how you start step one, have a Twitter account. Of course, um You could use your existing one and add some automated behavior to it or you could create a new account which could be fully automated and act as a real board. If you'd like, then there's maybe one tricky thing and this is getting approved for a Twitter developer account to get access to the Twitter API. That's a very important step. Um If you don't know what an API is, think of it as a stream and a pool of all the data that is coming through Twitter in a raw data format that can be fetched and processed with a programming language like Python Java javascript. Um get familiar with the Twitter API uh step three. And at last, of course, write a script that will react to the incoming data stream as you like it. So for example, retweet based on some criteria. So this is just a very short and basic uh code snippet. It's written in javascript and it shows how you could implement a bot script yourself. Um What we're doing here also for the non coders. I think it's quite easy to understand what we're doing here is um creating um uh Twitter connection to the Twitter API.

Um We are using the credentials we get when we are approved for a Twitter developers account, we open the Twitter stream filter all the millions and thousands of statuses that are coming through by some cri criteria. For example, by tracking some hashtags, we also filter by language.

And if there is a match in the Twitter data stream, we decide if we should block that tweet because it's kind of abusive or spammy or if we'd like to post that retweet in our own Twitter account. Don't worry. Um I share a link to my blog where I explain this in a more detailed way at the end of the session. So as soon as you have this set up, there's one new thing you should consider. If you do automated retweeting, you will probably attract spammers. So your bot will might well might appear spammy as well. You don't want that. So here's some, here's a little list I offer you on how you will not appear spammy and how you can take care of some things. Um You should filter unwanted uh content automatically. Um That works especially well with nude content which will come through. Um You should block user names with suspicious patterns. Um like user names that contain a lot of numbers are often used by spammers. You should block other bots because they are mostly not well maintained.

You should um filter tweets with too many hashtags before because they are often used by aggressive advertisers and you should identify um, and block shady strings. I have listed some here and I think it's quite clear why they are probably not that friendly. Um, also maintain a block list there. You will collect all the other names that have shared abusive content in the past as a last resort. So, but or not. Should you build one? Sure, I think, yes. Go for it. Use bot technolo technologies for your business or um just to have some fun. If you are a developer, it can be a great thing if you use bot technologies wisely. And the last little checklist from me to you always monitor your blog activity so that there is no abusive spammy content going through, do spot checks every now and then check also your direct messages. Um I do that a lot because um people will probably report spam and you can react to that, which is a great thing out of the community. And at last have fun with your own bot. So that's it actually. Thank you for your time. And if you have um questions we can connect afterwards. Um You can reach me via email, you can reach me via Twitter, of course, via linkedin. And um on my website, you can find this a shortcut to the post I just recently published about bot technologies.

You can find um the javascript uh script I posted there. Um and some other insights about about bought technologies and social media. Networks. So thank you. Thank you for listening. Have fun. Have a great day and see you soon. Bye.