The best automagical Twitter following tools for your business

Over the last few weeks, I have been sharing my tools and processes with you.  If you haven’t read them yet, be sure to check out Social media content discovery and curation for the win, Your social media marketing automation solution, My online influencer research and engagement process, and Tools I use to amplify social campaigns. Now, we’re on to automating Twitter following, following-back, and unfollowing. Most of the tools I have used have made the process semi-automatic because doing everything on automatic broke Twitter’s ToS; however, ManageFlitter drives through the loophole that Twitter left behind by offering a “let someone else do it” called Remote Management, which, if you’re a pro member, really works, though it can get expensive if you get addicted to it’s power. More on that later. Here’s my list:

SocialOomph

I’ll admit that I mostly use SocialOomph for their very handy auto-tweeting tool (I discuss it in detail over here: Your social media marketing automation solution). Before ManageFlitter offered its Remote Management tool and after Twitter shut the door on doing everything with one click, SocialOomph as my go-to when it came to following, following back, and

I just looked around SocialOomph and it looks like they’ve added a new follow-back function for an extra $6.44/month, so I just joined that up, but the tool isn’t functioning yet — probably a PayPal delay (I’ll let you know what I think when I have a chance to check it out). They call it the SocialOomph Follow-Back & Auto-DM service, though I never recommend doing any auto DMs on Twitter.

It’s really considered poor form, even if you think your one-liner is super-charming and looks totally real, it probably isn’t. Edit: I just checked the Follow-Back & Auto-DM service and it’s semi-automatic and reach follow-back opportunity requires going through their “vet followers” tool.

The tool would be impossibly tedious — and it is — until I installed the Check All plugin for Chrome, which makes the entire process semi-automatic and really very doable — it works like a champ (though Manage Flitter does the same thing automatically using Remote Management, though RM is was more expensive and for $6.44 plus the Check All plugin is pretty darn close — though it is surely not fire and forget).

Here’s what I get at $17.97/month as a SocialOomph Professional Subscription (and if I want the SocialOomph Follow-Back & Auto-DM service, I also have to pay $6.44/month):

• Connect an unlimited number of Twitter accounts to your user account.
• Schedule as many updates as you want. The 12 tweets per 60 minutes restriction for free members don’t apply to you.
• Post time-limited updates to Twitter that will automatically be deleted (self-destruct) from your Twitter account after the period of time that you select. Keep your feed clean of out-dated information that can confuse people.
• Schedule recurring updates, i.e., pre-configure your regular messages / updates / reminders, set them, and forget them.
• Easily set up alternate tweet text options for your recurring updates, so that your recurring updates don’t publish repetitive text. With each recur the system randomly picks one of your alternate text options to publish.
• Connect one or more update queue reservoirs to a social account and/or feed more than one social account from an update reservoir. The system drip-feeds the updates to the social accounts. All you need to do is fill the reservoir. You don’t need to worry about scheduling the updates.
• Bulk upload tweets and schedule them with no effort.
• Upload and schedule photos for your Twitter account.
• You still have all the other great things you have with a free account.

ManageFlitter

With the addition of Remote Management, ManageFlitter is a dream. It’s literally outsourced all of the annoying and tedious hours of clicking “accept” and “yes” and “unfollow” and “follow back” and “follow” to someone else, whomever that is.

Maybe there’s an accept, yes, unfollow, follow back, follow click farm somewhere and there are an infinite number of monkey clicking on an infinite number of follows. I don’t care.

It’s pretty cheap, especially when I consider my time valuable. To me, it’s worth it. $50 for 10,000 “actions” which is to say one follow is an action, one follow-back is an action, one unfollow is an action.

You can create elaborate follow, unfollow, and block rules and anything that meets these rules is processed automagically just as long as there are an appropriate balance of action ready there for spending on the Remote Management dashboard.

So, I do all kinds of cool things with the powerful search function that ManageFlitter Offers, including popping zip codes into the search function and then queuing up all the folks who show up in the physical and geographic areas I specify so that I follow them all. I can do the same thing with profile mentions, hashtag mentions, keyword terms, and a whole host of things — the limit is your imagination. The only thing it can’t do — none of them can do — is offer you the ability to bulk upload a CSV, EXCEL, or TXT file — or a handy box for copy-paste and submit — with all the @profiles that you want to follow but have collected elsewhere (come on innovative social media tool world!  Somebody make this for me, for us! I’d even pay for it, of course — why aren’t you doing it, ManageTwitter? Social Oomph, Crowdfire!?)

Spend some money on ManageFlitter — spend $50 on a subscription and then $50 on trying out the Remote Account Management (RAM) tool.  Here’s what I get for my spend, my $49/month ManageFlitter Business subscription:

• Unfollow people who are not following you back (Freebie plan limited to 200 daily unfollows)
• Unfollow accounts who are inactive, have no profile image or use a different language to you.
• Unfollow fake/spam accounts that you follow.
• Remote Account Management (RAM) – set-up rules to tell us who you want our Account Managers to unfollow or follow for you (additional cost – purchase of actions required)
• Block (force unfollow) fake/spam accounts that are following you. –
• Unlimited daily unfollows. –
• Account Search – search through over 80 million Twitter accounts in seconds – find the right accounts to follow. Improve your odds of reciprocal follows.
• Tweet Search – Follow or engage with people who have tweeted a hashtag, have included a targeted keyword or mentioned a specific Twitter account (including your competitors!) in their tweet. –
• Copy other Twitter account’s followers or the accounts they follow. Leverage other Twitter accounts to quickly find targeted people to follow. –
• Account Analytics – a quick overview of your current account numbers. View a graph of changes to your followers, following, tweets & influence over time.
• See who and when someone unfollows your Twitter account. –
• Tweet Analytics Overview – track Tweet keyword volume over time. View individual Tweets driving volume spikes.
• Email Reports – receive a daily or weekly email report summarizing the most important activity on your Twitter accounts. Receive alerts when high value, verified Twitter accounts follow one of your accounts. – –
• PowerPost – schedule Tweets for when your followers are most likely to see them. PowerPost guides you to easily select optimal Tweet times using a unique visual approach based on Twitter user engagement data. 1 per day
• PowerPost Bulk Engagement – schedule and manage posts to multiple users quickly and efficiently. Posts are sent at the time most likely to be read by each person you are contacting.
• PowerPost Recurring Posts – set posts to be sent out repeatedly over time. Great for infrequent marketing message you want to mix in with your usual content.
• PowerPost Rotate – access previous PowerPosts for reuse when required. –
• PowerPost Bulk Import – easily import, schedule and manage a large number of Tweets. – –
• @Inbox – easily manage a high volume of @replies. Maintain full control over the calibration of your @Inbox – respond only to the most important Tweets. Conversation threads help group related Tweets. – –
• @Inbox Campaigns – monitor and engage with Tweets based on selected keywords. Great for managing Twitter competitions. – –
• Permission Management – Isolate your clients’ or departments’ ManageFlitter Twitter account use from each other. Manage permissions for different customers or internal departments. Great for managing a large number of clients under one ManageFlitter account.

CrowdFire

I don’t really use Crowdfire that much, though I am still subscribing. What’s most appealing to folks that none of the other platforms I use offer is their mobile apps for iPhone and Android.  So, if you’re ever bored or in line and don’t want to spend on ManageFlitter’s awesome but expensive Remote Account Management (RAM) automagical tool, then you can do all the clicking yourself using the very gorgeous and well-programmed app (I’m installing it right now on my Androids, both my oldish Nexus 5 and my ancient Nexus 7 — maybe there are things that the app can do that are way more convenient to me while I am out and about on my phone.  Here’s what I get for my $9.99/month Crowdfire PLUTO subscription:

• Linked Accounts 2
• Team Members 1
• Whitelists/Blacklists 10000
• Unlimited Follows/Unfollows (Twitter)* ?
• Hide Previously Followed Users ?
• Remove ‘-via @Crowdfire’ tag from Twitter DMs

Fastfollowerz

I only recommend buying Twitter followers if you’re launching a brand new Twitter account. It’s impossible to start up a new business — or even personal — Twitter account without either making a huge spend over at Twitter Ads. Since you can only follow a maximum of 2,000 folks when you just start out, I recommend my clients buy 10,000 followers right away.

This will allow them to quickly break through the arbitrary follow ceiling that Twitter imposes on the newbies. Yes, if you pay Twitter Ads for Followers you will get real followers based on the kind of followers that you specify — and all of those followers will need to follow you — choose you — so it’s an opt-in model.

Buying 10,000 followers from Fastfollowers is going to be just a technicality, a way of breaking through the ceiling in order to make the tools I went through above more useful.  For $99 you can get 10,000 followers; for $30 more, you can specify that the followers should be American.

For another $30, you can get all 10,000 in only 48 hours, if you’ve let this go to the very last moment.  When you’re done, and if you’re self-conscious, then you can use ManageFlitter to unfollow all span accounts from your followers once you’ve started to build up your real followership. That’s what I do.

Man, I love ManageFlitter a lot and all the rest as well, but man do I want someone to build an app that gives me the ability to bulk upload a CSV, EXCEL, or TXT file — or a handy box for copy-paste and submit — with all the @profiles that you want to follow but have collected elsewhere. Does this already exist? Can a guy get a break? Please let me know if anyone wants to build this with me.

Anyway, I sure hope that this list has been useful to you. Please let me know what I am missing.  I know a lot of people love Tweepi but I have never used it.  Do any of you love it? Is there already an app that helps you follow folks that you can bulk and batch upload?  Please feel free to let me know in the comments — I really do read them and love them.

Until then, I’m really happy with these tools as they are and recommend them highly.  Good luck and Go Git ‘Em Tiger!