For a few years it was common to set up automated Twitter accounts for each StackExchange site that would tweet out new questions as they were asked. However, this practice ceased in 2015 because the StackExchange team saw low engagement numbers through Twitter.
Vegetarianism.SE doesn't have a Twitter bot because we formed in 2017, well after the practice ended. At least, until now...
I set up a new Twitter account called @StackVegetarian with the intention of tweeting out new questions. There is a reasonably large #vegan community on Twitter, so I'm hoping we might be able to attract some traffic from that segment.
Rules
I don't have any automation set up right now, it's completely manual. As such, I'm planning to follow several rules.
- Each question will be tweeted exactly once, in the same chronological order that questions are posted to the site. (I have chosen an arbitrary recent starting point.)
- No questions will be skipped. All questions will be tweeted.
- Tweets will only be deleted if the corresponding question is deleted. Tweets will stay up even for closed questions.
- The tweet will contain only the question title and a hyperlink (that turns into a twitter card). The hyperlink will not contain any user ID.
- If the question title includes the word #vegan or #vegetarian, that will be turned into a hashtag.
- No other tweets will ever be posted. No replies, no retweets, no quote tweets.
Future Plans
If the community approves of this, I might set up semi-automatic posting through a service like Buffer to space out tweets over time.
If the Stack Exchange community team wants to take over control of the account at any point, I will happily transfer ownership. I'll also happily cede ownership to any diamond mod upon request.
If this ends up being useful but I get tired of maintaining it, I might set up an automatic integration using something like AWS Lambda. (If you know of an easier way to set up automatic posting, let me know!)
