You're not the only one if you're tired of playing the Twitter auto posting game, following back only to be unfollowed back the next day, and making sure you haven't missed manual messages among thousands of generic "thanks for the follow" messages. I guess how you use Twitter effectively is up to you to decide - or is Tweet-Connection ever effective at all?
A Crazy Little Game Called Twitter
Tweeter-following is a game. There are twenty-something million mind-boggling number of bot accounts trying to follow other accounts every second of the day. You've been followed but you're following them back because they're bots, because they're porn, they're children, or users with no value. And when you follow them back because they seem real, they ruthlessly unfollow you the next day. This exercise is such a time-waster, isn't it.
Many people obsessively collect followers. You don't have to be famous to own a Twitter account with a million followers. You can buy 20,000 fake followers for as little as $5 at a time, follow, ditch, follow and ditch. Ludicrous hobby may it seem to me, who am I to judge what others do? The problem is when your account is swarmed by bots and crazy follower-collecting game players, finding real people to make a real engagement becomes very time consuming.
All you want is to show your appreciation to those who genuinely follow you. But it's inevitable you end up checking your recent followers periodically, means you put your foot in the game. Then you realise don't have time for that, so you start using an app to automatically control follow/unfollow. That's another game. The moment you create a Twitter account, you're in this gaming cycle whether you care or ignore.
Twitter used to have an auto-follow feature and it's been a few years since it stopped the service. There is no third party tool to automatically follow followers and unfollow unfollowers for free. Apps such as Crowdfire and ManageFlitter can display the recent followers/unfollowers where you can manually followback or dismiss.
More specifically, apps such as Heroic Social are useful, allowing you to check the users you're following but not following you back and letting you unfollow them with a click of a button.
And the saddest thing is, you don't need a brain to play this game. Millions of 8 years old tweeters, if not younger, are swarming and scramming your account "competing" with you. For what?
Buy Followers, What For?
Having slagged off the obsessive tweeter-collectors, it is the number of followers that decide whether your Twitter account look credible or not at first instance. "Revolutionary 14-day Diet Plan" advert probably wouldn't sell if you only had dozens of followers. But then again the number doesn't say much either. You could buy numbers from "Twitter follower sellers" in order to inflate the size of your account for nothing - no real social engagement, needless to say.
Auto Direct Messages
You can send an automatic message directly to your new follower using a third party app. Crowdfire is free and very easy to set up.
I must admit I have sent various, friendlier messages or message with a link in the past but stopped when I realised it was making little effect. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but you see the longer the message is, the less generic it will become. For example the other day someone followed me so I followed them back. Subsequently I received the following message;
Hey, quick question. What would you like to learn from me? Google Adwords, Facebook ads, how to use social media for business or how to be a successful entrepreneur?
Well, you followed me first. What can you offer? I'm sorry but I don't have time to check who you are...
IFTTT currently offers a funny little function to automatically tweet (instead of sending a DM) every time someone starts to follow. It will tweet "Hey [their name] thanks for the follow!". But because Twitter does not allow auto tagging of Twitter handle, the message may never be seen by the follower themselves. So it's pretty useless, although the range of applets that IFTTT offers is spectacularly wide, and for free. Take a look and give them a try.
So here's my dilemma once again; I don't want to not acknowledge anything to my valued (real) new followers, so I have a simple auto direct message set up to say thanks for the follow. Very rarely but occasionally I receive a manual reply. That makes me fell obliged to check incoming direct messages periodically, which can be time consuming because some are lengthy and heavily promotional.
Auto Posting and Recurring Posts
There are many social media auto schedulers such as Hootsuite and Buffer. They allow you to schedule-tweet but not many of them offer a function to post the same content repeatedly. Again that's because Twitter often filters and frequently flags repeated content as spam. As per their terms of use, Twitter may prevent you from publishing and repeat offences sometimes result in the temporary disabling of the account.
However some schedulers openly offer you to risk this. Tweet Jukebox and ManageFlitter allow you to set recurring posts at an interval of your choice. Millions of online marketers repost the same website content to social media again and again, being desperate to make known. If you are one of them, recurring scheduler service will certainly make your life easier.
In order to engage with just a fraction of 30+ million Twitter users, we're having to operate not just one but several third party apps...isn't it quite ridiculous?
