For those who don’t know Slack is a great collaboration tool. It’s rapidly replacing the need for emails at my current work.

One of the best things about Slack is that it allows incoming web hooks, and in simple terms – you can create your own bots that automatically push analytics or any data into Slack channels.

I’ve built a few different Slack bots so far, one of them integrates with Chartbeat to notify if any of our pages are starting to trend. I know that Chartbeat has recently built an integration but I prefer to build my own way, this way I can push whatever I want and create whatever threshold I want to push the posts.

Another project that I’m working on that I’m rather passionate about is understanding what articles will go viral. This is absolute vital for editorial teams in any media companies as they will know what content to generate. For example, if Wired posted this Facebook post, and it is clearly gaining traction – we would want our editorial teams to know about it.

So to address that, I’ve created a crawler that crawls through all of our competitors every five minutes, more than forty competitors’ Facebook pages are scraped using Facebook Graph API. It then analyses the likes and shares to understand if it is gaining traction.

Lastly, if it is gaining traction, it will post in a Slack channel so the teams could know about it.

Looking at the example below, the post by The Verge started to trend and it gained more than 120 shares in around 53 minutes. Hopefully our editorial team picked up on it and also wrote something on it also.

 

Final note, if I get some time – I’ll post some code examples.