How (and why) to auto-follow people on Twitter

2722732060 f6dc852c15 How (and why) to auto follow people on Twitter

by mathieuthouvenin

During a recent CharityHowTo webinar about Twitter, folks wanted learn some tactics to increase their Twitter followers.

A simple tactic for newbies is to follow users that are already conversing about topics related to their cause. The theory is that if 50% of Twitter followers auto-follow in return, you would get 50 new followers simply by following 100 users.

Naturally folks were curious about automatically following people, so I told them about two applications that allow you to find new followers and automatically following them based on vetting criteria.

Do you hate me now?

Some of you will say that I’m completely evil for using any type of automation on Twitter, and that’s fine.

My belief is that technology is not inherently evil, and that it is possible to use even the much-hated auto-DM in ways that people actually like.

Again, auto-following will work as long as you understand that you are following real people that like to have real conversations. Keep them formost in your mind, and you’ll make good choices in how you use these tools.

How to auto-follow people on Twitter

Here are two tools that allow you to choose specific criteria for finding new friends on Twitter.

  1. EasyTweets – Upside: Very easy to use, extremely intuitive UI. Downside: Criteria to find new users to follow is limited to keyword search and location.
  2. SocialOomph – Upside: Very feature rich friend finder criteria (including number of followers, friend/following ratio, and number of status updates), Downside: Very difficult to use. UI can cause eyeball headaches or possible aneurysms ;-)

What are other ways to use automated search and vetting?

Posted June 4, 2010
  • bearsonpatrol
    I'm trying the trial version of SocialOomph right now. It's easy to use, except that I'm not sure which keywords to use. I'm getting a lot of recommendations for other nonprofits, and (unfortunately) people named Charity.
  • You have to set up the filtering a bit better.
  • :-)
  • That was a useful response John :)

    @bearsonpatrol .... search for things that you or your nonprofit are interested in, programs you run, events you put on, ways you help people, etc. That should get you off to a good start. Refine from there.

    ps. nice info John. I'm checking out SocialOomph right now :) ... but 30 bucks a month to use all the most useful features ... not sure if it's worth it? What's your take?

    http://twitter.com/franswaa
  • I'm not a huge fan of auto anything on Twitter (auto follow, auto DMs, or even scheduled tweets to some degree), though it can be convenient. I think knowing who you are following is important in building relationships with the goal to cultivate a more in depth relationship over time. Also, a concern is auto-following folks or organizations who may not at all be aligned with your organization's mission or may be too political.

    If folks decide to use an auto-follow tool, I suggest checking often to see who you are auto-following.
  • Nicole - I'm really interested in your thoughts about automating tools for Twitter. I think your concerns about auto-following are reasonable in theory but think the advances in Twitter technology have provided numerous ways for those concerns to be assuaged. Twitter lists, for example, provide the perfect solution for keeping up with the people you follow. I use multiple columns with TweetDeck, with my first one being everyone I follow and the others being various categories. While I've never used any auto-follow tools, I've followed way too many people to remember them all. Every so often, I sport a good tweet on my "everyone" list that results in me moving that person into another list. I could work the same way when someone's suing auto-follow.

    I'm also curious about your thoughts on scheduling tweets.


  • Nicole - absolutely! SocialOomph has a vetting process you go through where
    you manually pick who to follow out of the ones that were automatically
    found. You can, of course, automatically follow based on a series of rules.
  • Johnny... You are such a wealth of valuable information. This is the most useful "How To" post I've read about using twitter in a long time. One day, I'm going to have to buy you a beer.
  • Looking forward to that day! :-D Compliments like that from you make my day!
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