Auto Reply to tweets using Yahoo Pipes - TwitterReplyPipe

TwitterReplyPipe is a simple mash-up that can search the public twitter time line based on a search criteria you define and reply to the tweets with a message from a set of messages that you define. Some use cases include
  • Look for mentions of your product and send replies telling users to look at products that you can cross sell.
  • Search for the category of your product and tell users to look at what you have to offer.
  • Search for tweets mentioning your competition and redirect them to a comparison page.
To set it up,
  1. Visit http://pipes.yahoo.com/axemclion/twitter_replier and enter the three inputs as explained below. 
    •  Query Key is the key as specified in the twitter advanced search page. To search for a phrase, use "phrase" and to search to a list of terms, try "q" as the input.
    • The Tweet file is a simple text file hosted on the internet with a set of messages that will be sent at random. You can host your files at http://pastebin.org using the steps below
      1. Visit http://pastebin.org and type in all the messages that you would like to send, one in each line. 
      2. Enter your name in, select that you would like to save the file forever and click "send"
      3. In the next page, copy the "download" link. It will look something like http://pastebin.org/pastebin.php?dl=
    • should be the phrase or the terms that you would like to search for.
  2. Click on"Run Pipe" button and you can see a preview of what the tweets will look like. Copy the "Get RSS" link which you will need for setting up the twitter feed account.
  3. Visit twitterfeed.com and create a new feed. In the RSS feed URL, paste the Pipes URL that you just copied. 
  4. Expand "Advanced Settings" and ensure that the "Post Content" is title only, "Post Sorting" is based on GUID and "feed is sorted" is unchecked. Also, uncheck the "Post Link"
  5. Continue to next step and associate your twitter account and complete the process
Once twitterfeed is also setup, replies would automatically be sent.
This is a followup to a post that I had written about a way to use YAHOO pipes to automatically reply to tweets that mentioned certain keywords. The initial pipe was rudimentary in a way that it could only tweet one message and could not use the extensive search capabilities of twitter.
If you have questions, please write to me and I would he happy to help.  You can follow this space to check out updates to this pipe.