One of Setfive’s New Years Resolutions is to prioritize our internal marketing. In establishing online presence, an initial project included refreshing the @setfive Twitter following list. To do so, we built a list of target accounts that we wanted to follow and then started searching for tools to automate the following. After some research, it appeared the only existing tools were paid with weird, and “sketchy,” pricing models. So, we decided to look at using the Twitter API to implement this list ourselves.
As we started looking at the API, we learned you need to be approved by Twitter to use the API. In addition, you need to implement OAuth to get tokens for write actions on behalf of a user, like following an account. We were only planning to use this tool internally once, so we decided to avoid the API and just automate browser actions via Puppeteer. For the uninitiated, Puppeteer is a library that allows developers to programmatically control Google Chromium, which is Chrome’s open source cousin.
Puppeteer ships as a npm package, so getting started is really just a “npm install,” and you’re off to the races. The Puppeteer docs provide multiple examples, so, I was able to whip up what we needed in a handful of lines of code (see below). Overall, the experience was positive and I’d be happy to use Puppeteer again.
So why would Puppeteer be interesting to your business?
In 2019 APIs are popular, many business provide access to data and actions through programatic means. However, not all of them do and that’s where Puppeteer provides an advantage. For example, many legacy insurance companies only provide quotes after you fill out a web form, which normally, you’d have to complete manually. If you automated that process with Puppeteer, you’d be able to process quotes at a much faster rate. 24 hours a day, and give yourself a competitive advantage against your competition.