How to Tweet on user's behalf

As part of multichannel campaign, we would like to tweet on customer's behalf. In order to accomplish that, we need the following,

• Create a Twitter application, which will tweet on customer's behalf. The application should also contain the appropriate campaign information and URL
• Obtain an access token for a particular Twitter handle or handles. This process does require user to log into his/her Twitter accounts and explicitly grant permission to the Twitter app, which will tweet on user's behalf. Once the access token is retrieved, we can tweet on the user's behalf through the app. The access token currently does not expire, except for in the situation where user changes his password or revokes the access permission explicitly

In the blog, we walk through the necessary steps on how to obtain an access token.

Setting up a Twitter Application

Step1: Log into https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
Step2: Filling the necessary information for the App, including the appropriate information for the Campaign,

Consumer Key, Consumer secret, and Callback URL will be used in obtaining access token.

Obtaining Twitter Access Token

Obtaining Twitter access token does require user to log into his/her Twitter accounts and explicitly grant permission to the Twitter app, which will tweet on user's behalf. Once the access token is retrieved, we can tweet on the user's behalf through the app. The access token currently does not expire, except for in the situation where user changes his password or revokes the access permission explicitly.

Here is a high level interaction diagram on this process,

Here is the corresponding sequence diagram,

Once an access token and associated token secret are obtained, we can store them in a persistent storage
and tweet on behalf of the user.
Twitter native Web Services API is very hard to use and we highly recommend going with Twitter4j.