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Building Your Twitter Followers Part 4: Auto Follow/Unfollow Engines

ePerception — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:03:33 +0000

The first 3 parts of this series covered how to manually build your Twitter account and all the steps that are involved in it. Part four is all about how to put this whole process on auto-pilot. This part will save you a massive amount of time.

The first think that you must understand about this method is that you must be willing to sacrifice money for time. This method will cost you money whether it be a one-time fee or a monthly subscription. The time that you will save in return is well worth the investment.

Here are the two different types broken down:

One Time Fee

Hummingbird 2 is a software program that includes this auto follow /unfollow engine. You will install this software on your computer in order to use it. They have three different levels of access, including Free, Lite, and Pro versions. If you pay, you pay once and that’s it. This program is what most of your professional Twitter users are using. It is also promoted as a Professional Marketing Tool.

Monthly Subscription

Tweet Spinner is a monthly subscription based application that also includes the auto follow /unfollow engine. You will not need to install anything with this application. Just sign into your account and configure it. They also offer a free version as well as a paid version for under $20 per month. Again, this is a professional application.

Both applications above will accomplish nearly the same thing. Once you configure your account, they will grow your followers in a manner that takes very little time at all.

Here is a list of features that you find with both of these apps:

Auto-Follow Engine
Automatically follow people that others are following.
Auto-Unfollow Engine
Automatically unfollow people that aren’t following you.
Keyword Filter
Follow people that tweet about certain topics.
Geo Targeting
Follow people only in a certain area.
Joined Date Filter
Follow people that have established Twitter accounts, either by the date they created the account or by the number of followers they have.
Status Update Filter
Only follows people that have tweeted recently. You control the filter.

As you can see, there are ups and downs to building a great following on Twitter. You can build it manually and save money, or you can build it automatically and save time. Whatever way you do choose, just do it. I have found Twitter to be one of the strongest Traffic generators for my websites, as well as a great way to meet new people for contacts and future business. Build a strong Twitter account and you will find it too.

Building Your Twitter Followers Part 3: Getting Rid Of Non-Followers

ePerception — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:28:05 +0000

In part 1, we learned about Twitter follow limits. Part 2 was about how to go about following others with the hope of them following you back. In part 3 we will talk about how to unfollow people.

There’s no doubt that you will end up following people that you don’t want to. You will also follow people that will never follow you back. Some will create a Twitter account and not understand how to follow you back. Others will know how to play the game well and just not notice that you followed them and never follow you back.

When you understand this, you will realize that you will have to let some of the people go that you are following. At first I could not figure out how to do this efficiently. Here’s what I mean:

You max out the number of people that you can follow
You need to figure out who is following you and who is not of those people
You click into your follower page(s) on your account and go to each profile and see if they are following you

The last action (above) could take days and maybe even weeks!

Then I found the solution… (Please keep in mind that this solution only works effectively if you have 5,000 followers/following or less.)

Here’s what you want to do:

Go to http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ . Twitter Karma is an application that is designed to unfollow large numbers of people. It will also show all your people (followers/following) and tell you what those people are to you.

In order to use this application:

Click on the “Sign In With Twitter Application”
Follow the instructions to allow Twitter Karma access your Twitter account
Once you get the authorization, click the tick box the says “Hide Avatars?” (This will allow your Karma to load faster)
Then click “Whack”
Allow your Karma to load (This can take a while. It can also time out. If it does, just refresh the page and click “Whack” again)
Once you Karma has arrived you are now ready to sort your Tweople.
Click on the “Show:” dropdown menu and set it to “Only Following. This will bring up all the people that you follow that do not or have not followed you back.
***Important: Make sure that click “Only Following”. If you accidently click “only Followers” and you unfollow all of them, you will devastate your account!***
Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click “Check All”.
Click “Bulk Unfollow”

That’s it. It’s really simple.

Here are few more things that you need to know. First, you should only bulk unfollow people when necessary. Doing it every day could result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Second, on days that you bulk unfollow, do not go through your following routine. This too could result in a suspended Twitter account.

In part four we talk about auto follow and unfollow engines and the power that can give you.

Building Your Twitter Followers Part 2: Finding Followers

ePerception — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:25:37 +0000

In part one of this series on Building Your Twitter Followers, we discussed Twitter limits, and mentioned 2 ways to build your followers: Manually and Auto Engines.

Part 2 is going to outline the manual way of following people so that they will follow you back. Building followers this way does take time. Also, it works well up to 5,000 followers. Once you get up that high, it gets really difficult to drop followers that are not following you.

Here’s how it is done:

Determine the type of followers that you want to get.
- First, determine keywords that match your followers.
- Second, find other people like you and take note of their username.

Both of these steps are important. Once you complete the first step, go here and do a search: http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter . Enter the keywords and a list of people will appear. Go to each of their profiles and follow them. **Be sure to document their usernames somewhere for later**

When visiting the profiles that you just found, determine the ones that have a lot of followers, and are tweeting regularly. You will want to model these people and forget about the rest. Try to compile a list of at least 40 people. (If you can’t get that high, get as many as you can.

Open up all the profiles in your browser window (each within its own tab)

(This step absolutely works the fastest and the best with Firefox) Once you have all of them up, go to each and click “Followers” to see who is following them.

If you really want to streamline this process then go here and download this plugin for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324 . Install it and after you have all the profiles open to their first page of followers, save the session. Make sure that you have your profile open in a tab as well. After you have the session saved, you will be ready to load that session again and repeat the following process.

Follow their followers
Just click on the follow tab of each of their followers. You can follow as many followers as you like, but I don’t recommend following more than 20-40 followers per profile.

You will also notice that some Tweeple will get more followers daily than others. These people generally already have 10,000 plus followers already. I like to move them towards the left of my tabs and add their followers first. Make sure if you do that that you resave your session.

That is the manual follow process explained. Once you get everything set up as discussed above, you will cut your time down dramatically.

In part three of this four part series I will discuss how to get rid of followers so that you can make room for more.

Building Your Twitter Followers Part 1: Twitter Follow Limits

ePerception — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:23:57 +0000

If you have a Twitter account, then your goal should be to build as many followers as you possibly can. This process can be very time consuming and annoying if you do it manually. Fortunately, there is a better way to this, and that way is by using an auto-follow engine.

Unfortunately, unless you are already well known, you will probably have to deal with the limits that are set by Twitter.

Here are the follow limits that you need to know about:

First, you cannot follow more than 1,000 new people in a 24 hour period. This works all the way up until you get to 2,000 followers. Once you hit that mark, you have hit what we call “the wall”.

Second, you are only allowed to follow a certain number of people after you have followed 2,000 people. That ratio is 10% of the amount of followers you have. What that means is that if you are following 2000 people and only 10 are following you, then you are stuck, and you will not be able to follow more until more follow you! If you are following 2,000 and you have 1,900 followers, then you will be able to increase the people that you follow up to 2,190. If you had 3196 followers then you will be able to increase the people that you follow up to 3516 people.

The main reason that well known people do not have to deal with these limits is that they generally have more followers than people that they are following. Twitter does not have a limit on how many can follow you. The percentage of individuals that follow few and have huge numbers of followers is very low.

That leaves the rest of us…

So what happens when you follow 2000 people and only 10 follow you?

You have to lose some followers, and go find some more. Getting followers on Twitter is all about following and unfollowing and following and unfollowing and on and on.

Now let’s imagine doing all this by hand. That’s right… I mean physically unfollowing people that don’t follow you. Then, following up to 1,000 people a day, one by one. It’s pretty hard to imagine, but I used to do it. As a matter of fact, I used to do it with 2 and sometimes 3 different Twitter accounts per day.

In part two of this four part article, I will talk about how to manually find followers to build a massive Twitter account.

3 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Twitter

ePerception — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:02:47 +0000

Twitter is the micro-blogging leader of the world. It is not surprising that there are so many other services that are copying and creating services like Twitter.

Some think that it is silly. Some people just don’t understand it. I personally think it is worth the time and energy I spend using it. It’s great for helping people, getting feedback, and just plain making lots of friends.

Here are the 3 biggest reasons that I use Twitter:

• To find more people who have the same interests
If you need people to survive, Twitter is one of the easiest tools you can use to find people. Whether you are looking for your next customer, or looking to see what the competition is up to, you can find people who are tweeting about any topic by using Twitter’s search engine. Plus, Twitter allows you to build a massive amount of followers so that you can build relationships, business or friendly. There is really no limit as how many followers you can have.

• To create a content distribution channel
Twitter is not the end of the road, and should not be used for that. What I mean by that is that you should use Twitter to push people to the rest of your content, not just to capture information. Looking at the overall picture, Twitter should be like a flood gate directing the flow of traffic. Plus, if you want to strategically create better results, then create value for your followers by entertaining them and providing them with useful information.

• To establish your name or brand on one of the biggest social fronts in the world
When I see a guy like Perry Belcher (Social Media & Internet Marketer), who has over 100,000 followers, it makes me wonder how influential he is. All I can say is “Very”. People listen to him, and he tweets awesome stuff. Twitter has helped him to build his brand. It can help you too. I once heard Perry say that the average Twitter user has the power to influence 500 people per day.

All in all, Twitter is one of the most powerful tools out there right now. If used properly, it can assist anyone to build many thousands of new followers in a really short period of time. More followers can definitely help you get farther and faster down your individual path.

To check out my Twitter page and consider following me, click here: ePerception on Twitter