With so many applications available to automate Twitter, does it run the risk of losing its social edge? Let’s look at a brief run down of what one could do with a Twitter account and an Affiliate Program that is capable of providing RSS feeds.
Once your Twitter account is created, you swing by TwitterFeed.com and plug in your RSS feeds to automatically post each hour (or however often you want them too) to generate your content. Next we’ll stop by TweetLater.com and make it so that our Twitter account will auto reply to anyone I follow with a direct “thank you” type of message and a link to your website. Make sure to also check auto-follow anyone who follows you and auto-un-follow anyone who un-follows you. You can also set it so that you receive an email if anyone replies with a @yourname.
Now we’ll start joining the online directories at WeFollow.com and Twellow.com, but don’t forget to also swing by Twibes.com and join some similar interest groups. Next it’s on to the spam-follow method of gaining users, which seems to be extremely popular these days. Basically, one searches through Twitter for users who have similar key words to their interest and follows all of them. After you follow a couple hundred followers you’re bound to gain a few hundred in return. Wait a week and then use FriendorFollow.com to un-follow anyone who isn’t following you. Oh and if you skipped a step and need to change your following or followers around in bulk there is always ReFollow.com
Guess what happens next? After about a week you’ll end up with a couple hundred followers who are just like you, auto-posting away and ignoring you and your product links. Chances are you may generate a little bit of traffic to your site from this, but more than likely you won’t see any monetary income coming from it anytime soon.
While automation is a great tool for Twitter, it’s not going to work for everyone, especially for users that have no real relationships and instead are just automated bots blabbing away at other bots 24-7. Remember, social sites are popular because they draw on the social aspect of people to talk amongst each other about their interests. If you automate yourself out of this, then you’re losing the whole point behind social based sites and their viral marketing capabilities.
– Michael G. Hurston