Sigh.
The Internet changes fast, and so must our marketing techniques.
This entire month, I’ve been promoting the use of TweetAdder. On Friday they released version 4.0 with many improvements, along with an announcement saying that they made a significant change to comply with Twitter’s terms of service. The announcement email states that they:
- Improved Search Filters (works with all search types)
- Filter Results by Followers, Friends, Tweets, Filter Private Accounts, Filter Accounts with default profile images, & More
- New Unfollow filtering options: Not Following Back, No Profile Image, Foreign Language, High Ratio, Inactive, Talkative, Quiet
- Updated profile data search – up-to-date search results
- Improved White/Black List now supports importing and exporting
- Pricing:
- In the future will become subscription only.
- Current owners grandfathered in (no subscription and free upgrades)
- Can still purchase and get grandfathered in to avoid subscription
Sounds good, right? Something’s missing…
What annoys me: They neglect to mention that to comply with Twitters Terms of Service, they had to remove the auto-follow and auto unfollow features. This was the primary reason most people (myself included) use the tool. There was no warning even though they had to have been working on the update for a long time. You can imagine the upset in the forums and the number of people complaining.
The thing is, I’m not a spammer. I understand why they had to make the change and if it cleans up spam from twitter, it’s a good thing.
For marketing, I’m very conscious about time management. I can follow and unfollow directly in Twitter…and since I used TweetAdder for this, I wanted to know how much time it would take. I timed it using TweetAdder 4 and found that:
- Unfollow 100 people: 55 seconds
- Follow 100 people: 57 seconds
Sidenote: it’s surprising how fast we can click, I had no problem doing two clicks per second at a comfortable pace. I’d bet that if I was in a hurry, I could do each task in about 30 seconds.
This is ridiculously faster than doing this directly on Twitter! In my post from early in the month, I showed that it took me about 4 hours of time manually doing the follow and unfollow. With TweetAdder 4 (opening the tool and going to “Not followed Back” (mine is set to 3 days) and clicking unfollow, then going into Follow later list and clicking follow). is going to be approximately 15 to 20 minutes a week. Yes, I need to open the tool every day, but still the huge time savings I’m looking for.
What I really like: In the experiment above, I did exactly what the previous version of the tool did. However, my goal is to get good, real followers. I already know I can get a better quality follower and avoid more spam accounts by spending an extra minute or two glancing at the tweets. Better quality followers = less spam an more potential people to buy your book.
It’s still a little annoying that they had to make the change, but if you manage less than 5 accounts, it’s still a huge time savings and is a good tool to help you find real, potential readers of your book.
I’ll do a video showing the new tool in the near future. Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts – Love it or hate it?