Dozens of bots are used every day on social media, in web design and digital marketing, and across the Internet. A bot is a software designed to do things like scale operations, increase efficiency in promotions or customer service, and distribute content. All a bot is is a script that runs automated tasks.
Here are the twelve most popular types of bots and their features:
Type #1: Chatbots
One of the most popular types of bots is the chatbots which are customer service bots. They are trained with business data to converse with customers, usually directing them to helpful content and/or answering direct questions.
Chatbots are growing in use and capability every day. Although they have their limitations, the chatbot software has proven immensely valuable in numerous industries. These types of bots are especially popular in online brand reputation management, Internet customer service, and online marketing.
Type #2: Spam Bots
Chances are, we’ve all seen spam bots. They post promotional content across the Internet, in an effort to drive traffic to a website. They are common on forums and in the comments section of various websites.
Spam bots are strongly discouraged and are known to generate bad publicity around the brands who used them. They never provide the return brands think they will. Fortunately, the use of spam bots is on the decline.
Type #3: Video Bots
Video bots are used in videos and video games, usually crafted from artificial intelligence. They are meant to assume a specific identity, usually a character in a video game that a user can interact with.
These type of bots creates a more immersive atmosphere for gamers, with fun and realistic interactions playing out between humans and the bots that surround them.
Type #4: Spider Bots
Spider bots are also referred to as ‘crawlers’. They are used to follow links to websites, scanning pages for indexing and to retrieve web content. They run in the background and fetch various data from websites. Spider bots are used most commonly by search engines and can download images, HTML, Javascript, and more. Spider bots play a huge role in organic search traffic.
Type #5: Scraper Bots
Scraper bots crawl the Internet to read data off websites for the purpose of harvesting the information. Scraper bots are slightly different from spider bots in the sense that they usually are targeting specific data.
These types of bots are often used by researchers, journalists, and similar professions. Scraper bots are great at accumulating information on a specific subject and comparing specifications, reviews, product pricing, etc.
Type #6: Social Media Bots
Social media bots are used by various accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They’re designed to increase follower count. They typically are designed to provide responses to certain words and phrases.
These types of bots repost a designated message and are an automated way to generate social media posts to relevant subject matter. The most common platform for this type of bot is on Twitter. There, they are used widely.
Type #7: Informational Bots
Informational bots scour the Internet or designated sources for helpful, relevant information typically related to current events. This type of bot is used in push notifications and often include breaking news stories.
Information bots are used often on social media by users and brands alike to help distribute ongoing information about current events, such as those relating to government.
Type #8: Transactional Bots
Transactional bots are designed to interact with endpoints. They have APIs that move data through platforms. They community with external systems and facilitate transactions.
This type of bot is used most often in robotic business process automation. Though not the most common bot, transactional bots are seeing more and more used with each passing year as brands seek automation as a way to minimize costs.
Type #9: Download Bots
Download bots facilitate the automatic download of software or apps usually on a smartphone. They are used predominantly by app developers and businesses looking to increase their download numbers. This is one of several type of fraud-related bot types. These are strongly discouraged, for obvious reasons.
Type #10: Text-Reading Bots
Text-reading bots can read through and interpret text. They often go searching for specific keywords. When a designated keyword is found, they take an appropriate action. Text-reading bots are used to find spam or offensive content online and to flag it.
They are a very common type of bot used on social media. They aren’t just used for this purpose, either. Text-reading bots are capable of language translation and can be used in real-time to help users translate languages foreign to them.
Type #11: Impersonator Bots
Impersonator bots are meant to mimic human characteristics on social media and often share political propaganda designed to sway one’s opinion. Impersonator bots are used around elections and similar political events to stoke certain sentiments in the general population and create conversation.
12. Entertainment-Based Bots
Entertainment-based bots are a large and creative category of bots. They are bots that automatically generate content based off a pre-defined algorithm. For example, ‘Deep Drumf’ is an entertainment bot that speaks like Donald Trump. ‘Detective’ is a bot that a user texts with, attempting to figure out if they are indeed speaking with a bot or a human. Though entertainment-based bots don’t serve much of an outward purpose, they can go viral and attract attention.
