Powering Mashable's #1Connection campaign with Twitter Data

Last year, we partnered with @mashable to power their #1Connection campaign for Social Media Day. We were inspired by their creativity and desire to use our platform to build meaningful and relevant connections via Twitter.

Mashable’s Social Marketing Manager Nora Grenfell (@nlgrenfell) describes the mechanics of the campaign:

We invited our community of social media followers to expand their networks by one and build global bonds across the web. By Tweeting out the hashtag, users were entered to be matched with a single person who shared their interests. Participants were paired up with new connections both around the world and in their own backyards. Some were professionally aligned, while others enjoyed the same hobbies, food and television shows. Think of it as pen pals for the digital age.

And here are a few of the responses from those connections:

Today, we’re pleased to partner with Mashable again to open source the code on GitHub.

This is a great way to bring other communities a little closer together and to make the code available as a starting point for other creative campaigns. Once the campaign is announced on social media platforms, the end-to-end code executes these three steps: 

• collects participants via their Tweets with the campaign hashtag using the Gnip Search API
• uses the natural Node.js package to categorize users into like-groups
• connects users via Tweet introductions using the REST APIs

For good measure, the code includes an option to filter out users and Tweets based on profanity.

We hope this code sample helps you strengthen your community, build new ones, or inspires an upcoming campaign. We’d be happy to accept pull requests for any improvements you have, and if you need more ideas and code samples, visit our TwitterDev Gallery.