Automate Twitter

Accounts which automate Twitter are usually a bad idea, if overdone any way. People that are legitimately only hanging out and mingling with his or her buddies will not likely run into this problem, however, if we are trying to apply Twitter as a marketing platform it could possibly only bring frustration should you over do it. Automation may work with various other aspects of online marketing such as, article submission or social bookmarking. Social marketing is just that – sociable, though bookmarking is more like merely letting people know that you're around ready to connect.

Like I mentioned, some Twitter automation is fine and in some cases essential as long as it is not over done. For example, the main idea of marketing with Twitter is to acquire a significant follower base – but what benefit would it be to acquire thousands of followers if they are college students and single parents when you are promoting marriage guidance? 600 targeted followers is much better the 50,000 untargeted followers. For that reason, bulk following or blasting tools will be a bad approach. Sure they're able to add thousands to your account, but 1 / 2 of them usually are not interested in you plus the other 1 / 2 have long disappeared and not been on Twitter in many weeks or years. There are lots of paid services that will let you enter keywords and phrases and then they will go find targeted followers for you and add them. On that note, twollo will let you add a couple of keywords totally free. More then 2, you have to pay.

The manual alternative to the paid sites are sites like ‘twellow’ ‘justtweetit’ and ‘whoshouldifollow’. Manually plug in a search term and get lots of choices. Certainly not automated, but a bit of determined effort will get you a substantial TARGETED follower base.

The 2nd most boring part of a Twitter account is monitoring the newest followers, following back, delivering welcome messages, catching those who un-follow as well as keeping a balance between followers and follow’ies. In other words – account maintenance.

This is one of those ‘must have’ automated Twitter tools. One extremely popular program is SocialOomph. Once known as ‘TweetLater’ this web site lets you auto follow and auto un-follow folks. This by itself is a huge time saver. At the same time it will let you immediately send a direct message to your new followers. This brings up another judgment issue..

Just what ought to be the very first tweet I send my new friends?

Think about this. In true life, would you stroll up to a brand new possible client and begin showing them the cool goods you have to sell? Yeh, you could, but most likely not still have a job as a salesman very long. Direct Message social manners will go something like this:

• Never: ‘Thanks for following me, now go check out my $hit @ . . . ‘

• Maybe: Offer a free gift by leading them to your squeeze page

• Better: Offer a free gift with no optin form – let the e-book direct them to you sites if they're curious.

• 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 2 possibilities.


You can do Twitter searches and follow people everyday (1,000 each day max, 200 – 400 per day suggested) but sooner or later you are going to reach Twitters 2,000 follower ceiling. At the 2,000 mark, they have got some sort of secret formula which dictates you have about a 200 person difference between followers and people 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 fine tune your list.

One really well known tool is Twitter Karma. You can list people that are not following back. It'll display those who have not tweeted in 2 or 3 weeks or months. Un-follow them. It'll also show who is still an active twitter-er but for whatever reason select to not follow you back. They can go unless of course it is somebody you really want to keep track of. So from that 2,000 mark onward you are going to need to keep an eye on it.

Another website I like even better is Manageflitter. It can let you sort the non followers, the active followers, the inactive, the quiet and the active. Even enables you to sort the ones which are too lazy to add a photo.

Now then, unless you intend to spend half your waking hours tweeting you life away, you are going to need a little bit of help. There are several services online that you can schedule tweets with but by far the best I’ve found is Twaiter. It is the first and only website that I’ve discovered which will still permit you to place reoccurring tweets totally free.

There are plenty of desktop applications that you can load up with scheduled Twitter updates with so being able to plan tweets is no hassle. I have a free application that you can import numerous one liners (tweets) and randomly have them post at random time intervals. The challenge becomes doing it in a way that will not cause you to look like a bot. With that in mind, you don't want to use Twaiter to publish the same thing every day at noon. A better option would be to come up with seven different versions of the same ad and schedule each once a week.

Main point here is this:

There are hundreds of websites and tools to help you with an automated Twitter account, perhaps a dozen really worth a hoot. None of these tools can help if you don't take an active role in group participation. A rough guesstimate is that automation should not account for more than 50% – 75%. You have to reply to legitimate direct messages, you must re-tweet, you must interject hash tags, you must see who is talking about you and become part of the community. If you don’t diversify your tweets and have interaction, eventually you turn into a spammer and no one likes spammers. Twitter will close you down.