In part 1 of ‘Automated Twitter’ we talked about the right and wrong way to automating followers and covered a bit of Direct Message etiquette. Here we are going to finish up follower maintenance and automating tweets for a well rounded automated Twitter account.
You can do Twitter searches and follow people all day long (1,000 per day max, 200 – 400 per day recommended) but at some point you are going to hit Twitter 2,000 follower ceiling. At the 2,000 mark, they have some sort of secret algorithm that dictates you have about a 200 person difference between followers and people you follow. Or 10% or something like that depending on your tweet history – it’s a secret. So sooner than you think you will need to fine tune your list.
One very well known tool is Twitter Karma. You can list those that are not following back. It will show those that have not tweeted in weeks or months. Un-follow them. It will also show who is still an active twitter-er but for whatever reason chose not to follow you back. They can go unless it is someone you really want to track. So from that 2,000 mark forward you are going to need to keep on top of it.
Another site I like even better is Manageflitter (dot) com. It will let you sort the non followers, the active followers, the inactive, the quiet and the active. Even lets you sort the ones that are too lazy to add a picture.
Now then, unless you want to spend half your waking hours tweeting you life away, you’re going to need a little help. There are several services online that you can schedule tweets with but by far the best I’ve found is Twaiter (dot) com. It’s the first and only site that I’ve found that will still let you post reoccurring tweets for free.
There are plenty of desktop applications that you can load up a schedule tweets with as well so being able to schedule tweets is not a problem. I actually have a free tool that you can import hundreds of one liners (tweets) and randomly have them post at random time intervals. The challenge becomes doing it in a way that does”t make you look like a bot. With that in mind, you would not want to use Tweetlater to post the same thing at noon every day. A better option would be to come up with seven different versions of the same ad and schedule each once a week.
Bottom line is this:
There are hundreds of sites and tools to help with an automated Twitter account, maybe a dozen worth a hoot. None of these tools will help if you do not take an active role in group participation. A rough guesstimate is that automation shouldn’t account for more than 50% – 75%. You have to respond 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 interact, at some point you become a spammer and no one likes spammers. Twitter will shut you down.
