Eleven Twitter app ideas for you
Hey Indie Hackers!
While working on TweetFeast I got to thinking about some "engineering as marketing" app ideas. Engineering as marketing is when you make small but useful web apps and give them away for free. People come to your site to use the free web app, and then discover your product.
Over time I've built up a list of these Twitter app ideas. I'm here to share them with you. If you want to use one of these please feel free. Ideas are cheap and there's room for more than one implementation!
App 1. Who are your fans?
This app would mine the user's Twitter account to find out who their biggest fans are. Who is liking and retweeting them recently? It would then build a timeline of just those fans who are most engaged. It would also tell you stats about those people like what topics they like and retweet. The purpose is to get to know your friends and fans so you can connect more closely with them on social media.
App 2. Pinterest feed tweeter
Turn your Pinterest account into a Twitter aesthetics account. This would be a simple way for Pinterest users to grow a Twitter following. It's super easy to curate a large collection of images using Pinterest and people love low-effort solutions for growing an audience.
I built a bot that does this for retrocomputing images called @c64core.
App 3. Sentiment analysis
There is pretty good search traffic for the phrase "Twitter sentiment analysis". I guess brands are using this and maybe people doing stock sentiment discovery to see if they should buy or sell.
There are a lot of good libraries for getting tweets out of the API and also for doing basic sentiment analysis. Putting this app together should be easy. I wrote an article about doing Twitter sentiment analysis with Python and JavaScript if you want to dig in.
App 4. Retweet bot
There is a bit of search traffic for this phrase too. The thing I can't work out is do they mean a bot that will retweet their own tweets, or a bot that will retweet tweets matching some criteria? Or maybe both?
Maybe people want a bot that will retweet all content to do with some search term like "indie games" or "music tech" or "bitcoin" or something. Any ideas?
Anyway an automatic one-click "retweet bot" seems like a fun and useful thing to build.
App 5. Turn Twitter threads into a blog
The idea is to get all the threads a user has created and turn them into a blog with one post for each thread. Like the Pinterest tweeter idea this would be a low effort way to syndicate existing content to a new format. It would allow people to abandon their blogging software and just write Twitter threads instead.
I had this idea a while back and then Pieter Levels tweeted this which got me thinking about it more:
App 6. Reward retweeters with perks
This app would let you reward people when they follow, like, or retweet your tweets. Let's call the app "PerkyTweet". The idea is you would tweet something like this:
This is my great announcement Tweet.
Like or retweet this to claim your free PDF!https:/ /perkytweet .com/claim/xWFdwi
The user would then like your tweet and visit the URL. Once they've logged in the app would verify their like and give them access to the content. This is variation on a similar idea I had for GitHub sponsors. The user could use it to incentivize liking/retweeting and following.
App 7. Articles extractor
This one is super simple. All it does is extract the links from Twitter timelines. Then you get a Hacker News style article list from them. The idea is to silence all the chatter and just get those juicy articles. No hot takes or life updates, just nice Sunday morning reads without all the noise.
I actually started implementing this as TweetFeast Reader. Maybe I'll finish it one of these days. 🤔
App 8. Twitter data science notebook
This would be a Jupyter style data science notebook preconfigured with a Twitter API library, authentication, and functions to make it easy to work with Twitter data. Data scientists don't want to mess around with registering an app with Twitter. They don't have to set anything up with this, they can just drop into the notebook and start mining Twitter for trends. The "notebook" style of coding has been exploding for a decade and it looks like a lot of people want this kind of low-code interface.
App 9. Tweet drafter, scheduler, and priority setter
Yes I know, Twitter already lets you write drafts. Tweetdeck and others allow you to schedule tweets. There are a ton of apps that do this stuff.
I think there is still room for a free web app that lets you simply maintain a list of drafts, set their priority (bubble your favourites to the top) and then schedule the best ones for tweeting. A really good UI that lets you do this for free might just be a winner.
I suspect some of the best Twitter accounts do something like this. Is Naval really just tweeting off-the-cuff? I don't think so. Maybe he's curating carefully behind the scenes to get those juicy nuggets.
App 10. Your best Tweets
This app will mine your Twitter feed (or anybody else's) and bubble the best tweets to the top of a list. This would be a fast and easy way to see somebody's best performing Tweets. Simple as that. It's kind of weird that you can't do "sort by most popular" in Twitter already.
App 11. Instant API access
The Twitter API can be quite annoying to work with. This would be a super streamlined site that gave you API access just by clicking a button. No waiting around for Twitter to approve you, create apps, set up keys etc.
You could also improve upon some of Twitter's endpoints, do automatic pagination, and fill in some of the missing endpoints from the Twitter API by doing aggregation on the back end.
The target audience would be developers who want to test an idea out without committing fully to registering an app and all that.
That's it
What do you think? Which one is the best? Variations? Would love to hear your ideas and feedback!
Thanks for tuning in. 😀
PS If you want to follow along with me building TweetFeast check out my dev log thread 👉 https://twitter.com/mccrmx/status/1384798793594413061
