Is Using Automated Twitter Tools To Gain Followers Appropriate?
I am noticing more and more the use of automation to gain Twitter followers. People that have 20 to 30 thousand followers and still growing by leaps and bounds. I thought the whole point of Twitter was to find a group of people, or followers as Twitter calls them, that you wanted to interact with. If you are using one of these tools you need to be careful as you will assuredly attract some undesirables.
Do you want to be watching your screen and see an endless display of tweets promoting sex, because that’s what you will get with automation. This is why I manually select each and every person I follow so I have some kind of control. Even still, I will surely attract some people I don’t want but it will be to a much lessor degree.
I just used a very nice tool called Twitter Kharma to bulk unfollow over a hundred people that haven’t updated in quite some time. These are not the kind of people I want following me. I want people that are active on Twitter so I can build relationships. I know there are a lot of people that don’t want to participate by tweeting, they just want to sit back and read their tweets from people they follow and that’s OK.
It’s called Networking. That’s why I joined Twitter. I want to meet new people from around the world.
A couple days ago I had a nice discussion with a gentleman that just happens to be one of the biggest names in Internet Marketing. The nice thing was we didn’t even mention Internet Marketing, we talked about a completely unrelated topic. Without Twitter this conversation would not have been possible with this high profiled person. Who knows, maybe we become friends and someday he may offer to help me in some way.
I just refreshed my browser and this is another thing I really dislike about the abuse of Twitter. Out of a possible 20 tweets that gets displayed on one page, 8 are from the same person that’s promoting a product. I just unfollowed this person. There is nothing wrong with using Twitter as a platform to promote something but don’t overdue it. Very rarely will I promote something and when I do I certainly won’t do it 8 times in a second.
To me this is just a big turnoff. If I build relationships with people and they trust me they will seek out my blog that is listed in my profile.
I want to end this by saying I was inspired to write this post after visiting the blog of a friend of mine named Gary Simpson. He wrote a nice piece on “Your Credibility on Social Media Sites“. Go read it and tell Gary I sent you.
Please let me know what you think about these tools that get you thousands of followers in a very short period of time. And if you can think of some good useful Twitter tools feel free to comment about them here.
Oh! How foolish of me, I almost forgot to ask if you wanted to follow me on Twitter.
til next time…
Tagged with: follow me on twitter • Internet Marketing • networking • tweets • twitter • twitter followers • twitter kharma • twitter tools
Filed under: Social Media
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Hi Jeff,
GREAT post on a very topical subject right now.
Thank you for the link and references to my blog post too.
I have been somewhat dismayed of late at the number of big name IM people who are so OBVIOUSLY using automatic following tools to gain follower numbers. I made reference to this today in a reply to one of the many comments made over at the TEMPLE (LOL, yes I am half tongue-in-cheek and half serious with that name).
You see, they MUST be using those auto tools because NOBODY in their right mind would be knowingly following some of the OVERT PORN people. Some of these porn people are displaying truly DISGUSTING avatars and appallingly explicit sex on their background pages.
For God’s sake – kids use Twitter and can view it openly. They don’t need to be shocked or corrupted like this.
The sooner Twitter chops these people off the BETTER! Look, I am NO prude and yes I certainly like the female body but…
… explicit sexual material has NO place on Twitter in my opinion. If people want to view porn then they can go to a damn porn site – there certainly is a plethora of them on the net.
If all porn and spam was removed from the net then probably half the space would be freed up. It will never happen, I know – mainly coz of the money being made.
Anyway, these are my opinions on such matters and I doubt whether anyone could convince me otherwise. Though, I will listen to anyone who has a half-decent counter argument to put forth.
Thanks for alerting me to your post Jeff.
Regards
Gary Simpson
Thanks for dropping by Gary.
I follow some pretty big name marketers and I don’t just mean on Twitter. I look up to these guys/gals and admire what they have accomplished. I know they have worked extremely hard to get to where they are now. I also know that in this business you need all kinds of tools to make your life easier and to free up some time.
But at what cost. I feel some of these Twitter automation tools have crossed the line. Reputation is everything when you run an online business and I just don’t understand why you would take the chance of ruining it just to gain a truck load of followers. I know it’s nothing but a big numbers game with online marketing and everyone wants as many people following their every move so they can make more money but we have to draw the line somewhere.
I for one am not willing to sacrifice my reputation for the sake of more followers.
With that said, I’ll just keep poking along, manually selecting who I follow so I don’t end up following the wrong type of people inadvertantly.
Later,
Jeff Sargent
Hey Jeff, I will get to the follow button here shortly. I make it a habit to follow those who have something worthwhile to say and I don’t give a Damn about numbers.
Just finished blocking a couple followers who like many blog posters sneak the x-rated stuff somewhere in their URL stream. I’m like Gary, I love beautiful women but, adult content does not belong on a social platform or blog related to business, religion, social issues and friendly banter!
I don’t know why with all the money being made in Adult entertainment, they don’t have their own versions of popular social sites or they do and we just don’t know about them.
Anyway, I enjoyed your post and getting ready to head over to look at Gary’s. Thanks for the input and I for one totally agree with you! George
I think the Tools are as appropriate as Giveaways. So, I don’t see anything wrong with using them.
As for the Adult Content it shouldn’t be allowed unless I give them permission to send it to me. Those that send that content without my permission should rot in hell.
That’s just my opinion
Thanks for your input Gary.
I don’t see your comparison of automated Twitter tools that blindly go out and get thousands of unknown followers some of which may be undesirables, and Giveaways. At least with Giveaways people want your product you are offering for free or else they wouldn’t be willing to give you their personal info.
Later,
Jeff Sargent
Great post on a topic that’s been running through my head the last few weeks. I think the quality of followers you get is much more important than the quantity. However, having a high number of followers seems impressive to people at first glance.
A question I have is, don’t these tools let you identify the types of people you would like to add? This would eliminate the problem, and be beneficial for everyone…
Thanks for visiting my blog Omar.
To answer your question Omar, whether or not these automated tools let you identify the types of people you add is a very good one. Unfortunately one I can’t answer because I don’t use them. But, I’m going to venture a guess that some of them don’t because of the type of people that are following these huge lists. There are people out there that have as many as 500,000 followers. I go in and look at some of the followers and they are selling porn or some other undesirable product. So when I see this I have to assume that either they don’t get to see what type of people are following them or that they just don’t care. It’s clearly a numbers game to see who can get the most followers. Let’s face it, who really needs half a million followers.
Later,
Jeff Sargent
I am not sure I like automation. I think it damages what twitter tries to do. If you use twitter as part of your online business you should do it in a way that makes sense to your market/blog.
I am not a big fan of automation. I prefer to build quality followers. You have a higher conversion rate this way. Plus this way you can use your followers over again. With automation you won’t get as much revenue. It’s time consuming but once your done, like I said you can repeat. I would rather just pay someone to do it for me, if I am busy.
Hey Nicki,
Thanks for your comments. I’ll have to agree with you that you will get better quality followers if you do it all manually yourself. You say if you’re busy you’d rather pay someone to do it for you.
Well, that’s the same thing as automation isn’t it? You have no control of what goes on. You’re either at the mercy of some software or a person. Granted, if given a choice I’d choose the person if I knew I could trust them.
Later,
Jeff Sargent
So true…
What could I do with 5348957823462378 new followers which I don’t know, which are not interested in what I do or which are bots ?
And there’s nothing wrong with unfollowing. Following is for free, unfollowing as well
Filter, filter, filter. And if you remove someone really important by mistake, you’ll certainly stumble upon him or her later on.
Birdie
I for one am not willing to sacrifice my reputation for the sake of more followers. A question I have is, don’t these tools let you identify the types of people you would like to add? This would eliminate the problem, and be beneficial for everyone… Nice article Thanx for sharing
I have been doing mine manually and was thinking about automating some of it – I think I will stick to growing organically now that I have taken all this in
AL
To effectively use Twitter for marketing, without having to spend all your prescious time on Twitter, it’s required to set up a system. An effective system that builds your Twitter following will turn you as an authority in your niche, and will effectively promote your product, service, business.
I’ve had a great change in attitude about this topic.
As a test, about 2 years ago, I created ~50 completely automated Twitter profiles. The Tweets were generated using Google Alerts for a subject (say, “urban apparel”) and were filtered through Yahoo Pipes to remove certain types of useless content from the RSS feed. Then the feed went plugged into an rss-to-twitter web app. I didn’t ever try to friend any other user, but waited for users to find these accounts, perhaps through Twitter search. I used another web app to autofollow those who followed me.
Now, about 20 of the 50 were shut down by Twitter. Maybe 5 I shut down myself, for various reasons. About 25 are still running, and gaining followers on a weekly basis… I estimate about 25,000 followers across these 25 profiles right now.
These 25,000 followers still engage with the profiles through replies or RT’s or DM’s somewhat frequently (and, occasionally I reply, though infrequently and through DM). I’ve received praise on them from my followers a few dozen times. I honestly believe I’ve helped people with my newsfeeds, even though at their creation, I never intended to. In fact, I’ve even contacted local PR and journalism students for my regional accounts in recent efforts to de-automate the accounts.
So, was it ethical or appropriate to use automated tools? I think, in the case of these profiles, it absolutely was. But only because I haven’t abused them… I haven’t been pumping them full of affiliate links or using them to try and connect with everybody and their mother. That stuff deserves a quick ban from the lords of Twitter.
It all depends on the delivery. The experience. The expectations.
Hey, thanks for the extremely thought-provoking article. All the best,
Glenn Friesen