Python script to check your Twitter followers and send you a Slack notification of how many this is.

twitter-follower-bot.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import tweepy
import urllib2
import time

# For Twitter: Add the relevant keys, tokens and secrets from your Twitter app made here: https://apps.twitter.com/

consumer_key = ''
consumer_secret = ''
access_token = ''
access_token_secret = ''

# Variables - configure the bits below to get your script working. 

wait = 12600        # Time (in seconds) between checks. Default is 12600 seconds (210 minutes / 3.5 hours)
style = "#1da1f2"   # Colour for the message - default is Twitter Bird blue
userid = ''           # The Twitter user you want to track the followers of (without the @)
handle = ''         # Tweak this to display the userid in a nicer format - i.e. "Raspberry Coulis" instead of "raspberrycoulis"

# Slack incoming webhook URL

webhook = ''

# Tweepy API - do not change
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
follows = api.get_user(userid)

# The function that does the magic - checks your Twitter user for the number of followers then sends this data to Slack to notify you.

def followers():
  while True:
    fans = str(follows.followers_count)
    data = '{"attachments":[{"fallback":"'+handle+' has '+fans+' followers.","pretext":"'+handle+' has '+fans+' followers.","color":"'+style+'","fields":[{"title":"Twitter Fans","value":"'+handle+' has '+fans+' followers.","short":false}]}]}'
    slack = urllib2.Request(webhook, data, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'})
    f = urllib2.urlopen(slack)
    f.close()
    time.sleep(wait)

followers()

    slack = urllib2.Request(webhook, data, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'})
    f = urllib2.urlopen(slack)

You really need to respond to and cope with errors from the webhook post. Twitter will eventually rate-limit you too, so make sure you can handle that.

I know you were after coding feedback.

Instead of:

+consumer_key = ''
+consumer_secret = ''
+access_token = ''
+access_token_secret = ''

Look at how to read environmental variables - or extract this to a config file like I've done with phototimer and scrollphat:

https://github.com/alexellis/phototimer

Then make the config file part of the .gitignore and give a sample version that is checked in.

# Slack incoming webhook URL

webhook = ''

Maybe you should add a comment about how to get/create a slack URL. Link to the docs page you used.

Thanks @alexellis, will take a look at the configuration variables you linked to. I'm going to add more info to the GitHub repository in the README.md for Slack webhooks etc., so will include a link to that as a comment in the relevant part in the code too. I've changed the timing for the check to every 3.5 hours - the idea being that businesses could use this to check their social media following (in fact, my company is now using this to check our new Twitter account for followers and we use Slack, so this was something I put together with this in mind initially), but I'll look into the API limits for this type of call.

HI,
@mentions are more volatile and would be nice to track, too.
Nice indicator that something is going on.

Every 15 minutes for near real-time alerts, or if you want to go easy on the API, just twice a day.
Then you can send the info and compare with a (floating?) average rate of the same day of week.
History could be tracked on a physical display, then :)

Maybe some other online service would serve as interface and expose an API with historical statistics? (I didn't check)

I did some twitter automation before, some with IFTTT, but found out that @mentions (and actions in reaction to @mentions) were pretty sensitive on the twitter side and may get your account blocked (temporarily however), so be careful.

Thanks @actuino,

I had thought about that, but felt that Twitter will notify you of any mentions etc., via the app or site anyway. However, keeping track of your followers was not as quick - you can see them from your profile, but I'm working on growing my company's Twitter account and knowing how many followers we have is useful.

Although I do like the idea of tracking the information on a physical display!

@alexellis, I've take on board your feedback about a configuration file and have updated the repository accordingly. If you fancy taking a look and seeing if this flows better, than that would be great: raspberrypi-socialmedia-bot