ToS and programatical follow

[boblefrag]

Hi
I'm working on a website how expose interesting things about cooking and food.

We have created a service how use the stream API to get information about
people on twitter talking about our subject of interest.

In our website, if our administrator thinks that content is good enough, he mark the twitter account as "interesting" and we look for his tweets with Stream API. I want to tell that it is a manual action for our admin.

But we have now the idea to follow this twitter users talking about food with our account ( 1 account ), the one that we have marked as interressing, but in reading carefully the ToS Twitter says we cannot auto-follow twitter account.

As we don't want to auto-follow but follow programaticaly, principaly to avoid annoying repetitive task like : mark it as "interressing" in our website back office then go on twitter to follow them, I'd like to ask you if it is permited to programaticaly follow people like we want to do ?

Best regards and thank you in advance.

[Taylor Singletary]

For a case of single-account use like this, you're totally fine using the API to programmatically follow. Most of the terms around automated following are clarified here: http://support.twitter.com/entries/76915-automation-rules-and-best-practices with some more general information on the limits of following here: http://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices

Avoid follow-churn: don't follow then unfollow, then refollow. Keep your following rate reasonable -- though you're programmatically following you should still throttle your actions to a polite rate, especially if you're planning on a larger number of follow actions. 

Finally, make sure you're using an account with a bio and a picture, maybe even some tweets. A generic looking account that follows a bunch of users but has no followers or tweets or identity itself is likely to be reported as spam.

@episod - Taylor Singletary

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