Sometimes you want to reach out to people who aren’t following you on Twitter. You could do this by sending one tweet at a time. Or you could automate the process and do it in bulk. In this tutorial, you will write a Twitter Bot using the excellent Tweepy library to send a message to a list of users.

First, start a new application at https://dev.twitter.com

After that, create a file, keys.py, and add the following:

keys = dict ( consumer_key = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' , consumer_secret = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' , access_token = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' , access_token_secret = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' , )

Enter your keys and tokens from Twitter. Then create a file, nudge.py, and add the following:

import tweepy , sys , time from random import randint from keys import keys CONSUMER_KEY = keys [ 'consumer_key' ] CONSUMER_SECRET = keys [ 'consumer_secret' ] ACCESS_TOKEN = keys [ 'access_token' ] ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = keys [ 'access_token_secret' ] auth = tweepy . OAuthHandler ( CONSUMER_KEY , CONSUMER_SECRET ) auth . set_access_token ( ACCESS_TOKEN , ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET ) api = tweepy . API ( auth ) handles = sys . argv [ 1 ] f = open ( handles , "r" ) h = f . readlines ( ) f . close ( ) for i in h : i = i . rstrip ( ) m = i + " " + sys . argv [ 2 ] s = api . update_status ( m ) nap = randint ( 1 , 60 ) time . sleep ( nap )

Next, create a file, handles.txt, and add the list of Twitter user names you want to message:

@dotototdotcom @helloworldshow @jarednielsen

Run this script from the command line by passing three arguments to the Python interpreter. The first argument is the file itself, nudge.py. The second argument is our list of user names, handles.txt. And our third argument is the message we want to send to everyone on the list.

python nudge.py handles.txt "Nudge nudge..."

Go see for yourself. Then try it again with a different message.

Let’s walk through it. First is our imports: tweepy , of course, but we need sys for the arguments we are passing, time for the nap we want our for loop to take in-between iterations, and randint to generate the length of said nap. Finally, we import our keys from our keys.py module:

import tweepy , sys , time from random import randint from keys import keys

The next few lines are straightforward, we create CONSTANTS with our keys and connect to the Twitter API.

CONSUMER_KEY = keys [ 'consumer_key' ] CONSUMER_SECRET = keys [ 'consumer_secret' ] ACCESS_TOKEN = keys [ 'access_token' ] ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = keys [ 'access_token_secret' ] auth = tweepy . OAuthHandler ( CONSUMER_KEY , CONSUMER_SECRET ) auth . set_access_token ( ACCESS_TOKEN , ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET ) api = tweepy . API ( auth )

Next we read our handles.txt file:

handles = sys . argv [ 1 ] f = open ( handles , "r" ) h = f . readlines ( ) f . close ( )

As you will recall, our file, handles.txt, was the second argument in our Python interpreter command. We reference it here with sys.srgv[1] (1 because Python begins its count at 0, and our first argument was nudge.py), and then assign it to the variable handles . We next create a new variable, f , that we use to open handles . The “r” parameter tells the open function that we want to read the file. In the following line, we read the lines in f and store them in a new variable, h . Finally, we close our file.

Now the fun part.

for i in h : i = i . rstrip ( ) m = i + " " + sys . argv [ 2 ] s = api . update_status ( m ) nap = randint ( 1 , 60 ) time . sleep ( nap )

Using a for loop, we iterate over all of the user names stored in h . We want to strip off unnecessary newline characters and white space from each user name string. We do that using the rstrip() method. Then we reassign the variable back to itself. Next we concatenate our message by adding our user name string to a blank space, ” “ , and adding that to our message, which is sys.argv[2] . Next, we send our message to Twitter with api.update_status(m) . And lastly, we rest. We generate a random integer between 1 and 60 and pass that to time.sleep() to pause the program for that many seconds. We do this so our robot will appear less robotic to anyone watching.

Now you’re ready to sing your praises to the world with your new Twitter Bot.