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Accounts that automate Twitter might just be a bad plan, if overdone any way. People that are legitimately just hanging out and socializing with their buddies will not likely run into this problem, however, if we are trying to apply Twitter as a advertising and marketing system it can only bring failure if you over do it. Automation might work with various other areas of web marketing such as, article submission or social bookmarking. Social marketing is just that – social, while bookmarking is more like merely letting people know that you’re around willing to hook up.
Like I said, a certain amount of Twitter automation will be fine and sometimes essential as long as it is not over done. As an example, the whole concept of marketing and advertising with Twitter is to acquire a huge follower base – but what good is it to build thousands of followers if they are college students and single parents when you’re marketing marriage counseling? 400 targeted followers is much better the 50,000 untargeted followers. For that reason, mass following or blasting software will be a bad idea. Sure they might add thousands to your account, but half of them are usually not interested in you and the other 1 / 2 have sense disappeared and not been on Twitter in many weeks or years. There are many paid services that will allow you to enter key phrases and then they’ll go locate targeted followers on your behalf and add them. On that note, twollo (dot) com will let you add 2 keywords at no cost. More then 2, you pay.
The manual alternative to the paid sites are sites like ‘Justtweetit’ ‘Twellow’ and ‘Whoshouldifollow’. Manually plug in a keyword and get plenty of possibilities. Not automated, but a bit of hard work can get you a sizable TARGETED follower base.
The 2nd most tedious aspect of a Twitter account will be keeping track of the newest followers, following back, delivering welcome messages, finding those who un-follow and also keeping a balance between followers and follow’ies. In other words – account maintenance.
This is one of those ‘must have’ automated Top twitter tools. One well liked service is SocialOomph. Once known as ‘TweetLater’ this site allows you auto follow and auto un-follow people. This alone is a huge time saver. At the same time it enables you to immediately deliver a direct message to your new followers. This brings up another judgment issue..
What ought to be the initial tweet I send my new friends?
Consider this. In real life, would you walk up to a fresh possible client and start showing them all the neat goods you want to sell? Yeh, you might, but probably not still have a job as a salesman very long. Direct Message manners will go something like this:
• Never: ‘Thanks for following me, now go have a look at my $hit @ . . ‘
• Maybe: Offer a free gift by directing them to your squeeze page
• Better: Offer a free gift without any optin form – let the e-book steer them to you websites if they’re interested.
• If all else fails: Don’t send out a message at all! Like my mama used to say.. ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’
Personally I’m in favor of the last two possibilities.
( Part 2 of this report can be found HERE.. )
Related Blogs
In part 1 of “Automated Twitter” we talked about the proper way and the wrong way of automating followers and dealt with a little Direct Message etiquette. Here we will finish up follower maintenance and automating tweets for a well rounded automated Twitter account.
You can perform Twitter searches and follow folks over and over (1,000 everyday max, 200 – 400 each day recommended) but at some point you will hit Twitters 2,000 follower limit. At the 2,000 mark, they have some sort of secret algorithm that requires you have about a 200 person difference between followers and the ones you follow. Or 10% or something like that depending on your tweet record – it’s a secret. So sooner than you think you will have to tweak your list.
One very well known tool is Twitter Karma. You’ll be able to list people that are not following back. It’ll display those who have not tweeted in 2 or 3 weeks or many months. Un-follow them. It will also show who is still an active twitter-er but for whatever reason chose to not follow you back. They can go unless it is someone you want to track. So from that 2,000 level forward you are going to have to keep an eye on it.
Another site I like even better is Manageflitter. It will let you sort the non followers, the lively followers, the non-active, the silent and the active. Even lets you sort the people which are too lazy to add a photo.
Now then, unless you intend to spend half your waking hours tweeting you life away, you’re going to need a little help. There are many services online that you are able to schedule tweets with but definitely the most effective I’ve found is Twaiter. It’s the first and only website that I’ve found which will still let you place reoccurring tweets for free.
There are numerous desktop programs that you can fill up with scheduled twitter updates with so being able to schedule tweets is no hassle. I already have a free tool that you could import hundreds of one liners (tweets) and at random have them post at random time intervals. The challenge becomes doing it in a way that will not cause you to seem like a bot. Keeping that in mind, you don’t want to use Twaiter to post the same thing at noon every day. A far better option would be to come up with seven different variants of the same ad and schedule each once a week.
Important thing is this:
There are hundreds of websites and applications to help you with an automated Twitter account, maybe a dozen really worth a hoot. Not one of these tools can help if you do not take an active role in group contribution. A rough guesstimate is that automation should not account for more than 50% – 75%. You must respond to legitimate direct messages, you must re-tweet, you must interject hash tags, you must see who’s talking about you and become part of the group. If you don’t change up your tweets and have interaction, at some point you turn into a spammer and no one likes spammers. Twitter will close you down.
( In case you missed part 1 of this report, It can be found HERE.. )
