As I have mentioned several times in previous posts, there are few things in business more challenging, more stressful, and more frustrating than being asked to market your company’s products and services on a shoestring budget. Those of us who have carved a career out of small company (and small budget) marketing know the secret to success lies not in the methods we choose, but rather in the effective and creative use of our time. For the small company marketer, the phrase “work smarter, not faster” is not just a cheesy motivational poster—it’s also a pen, a coffee mug, a desk calendar, and a horribly ill-fitting trade show shirt.
With the above in mind, the emergence of social marketing sites like Twitter has opened up an entire realm of new and low-cost marketing channels—channels that (in most cases) cost the small company marketer nothing but their time. Although Twitter is perfectly capable of burning hours of otherwise productive marketing effort, a handful of creative developers have put together some great tools to minimize the time we as marketers spend in our chairs each day. And I am happy to say I could not survive without any of them.
Twitter Tool #1: The “Follow Everyone in a Twitter List” Button (by TweepML)
After performing this function by hand for months when Twitter first released its “Lists” feature, our good friends at TweepML finally gave marketers the opportunity to follow every person in a Twitter List with a single click. Sound easy? It is. The process is frighteningly simple: you paste the name of a Twitter list you wish to follow into a form field (TSCB/smallbiz-tweeters, for example) hit the “Follow” button (wait a few minutes for the list to appear), login with your Twitter account, tell TweepML to follow them for you, then grab some lunch. When you come back, each individual in the targeted Twitter List (up to 500 people) will be in your “Following” group—and hopefully many will have chosen to follow you back as well.
Tool #2: The Friend Flusher (by Buzzom)
For those who have been struggling with Twitter Karma’s painfully slow and often unreliable “Whack Your Followers” feature, there is a new tool in town: the Buzzom Friend Flusher. In fact, unfollowing people on Twitter who refuse to follow you back has never been easier: simply visit the Buzzom home page, click the “Login with Twitter” badge (center-right, near the top) then hit the “Flush” button in the top left-hand corner after logging in. Within seconds, Buzzom will return a list of people you follow who haven’t returned the favor, and you get to choose whether to keep or “flush” each one individually.
Tool #3: The 6-Day Free Trial (by SocialOomph)
Those of you who haven’t tried SocialOomph have surely heard about it for good reason: it’s one of the most feature-rich social marketing tools there is. But did you know SocialOomph offers small company marketers free use of their Professional Edition for almost a week? In addition to a highly configurable Friend Finder and bulk Tweet uploads, SocialOomph specifically caters to overworked marketers with features like drip feeds, URL shortening, parameter tracking, full blog integration, and clickthru analytics. Registering for the Free Trial requires no credit card—and if you set up your Friend Finder right away, your six days of free use will also include 300 new, highly qualified Friends.
Tool #4: The Automatic #FollowFriday Generator (by The Twitter Tag Project)
If I had to rank automated Twitter tools based on how much time they save me each week, Twitter Tag’s automated #FollowFriday generator would be right at the top. By definition, a big part of any social marketing program includes showing appreciation to people who support you. And there is no better way to say “Thanks” on Twitter than by offering a #FollowFriday recommendation. The system takes seconds to use: you simply enter your Twitter user name into a field, and the system returns about 20 properly formatted #FollowFriday shout-outs to your 200 most active followers—minus duplicates, of course. Once the Tweets are generated you can either click a button on the Twitter Tag website to send them immediately, or copy and paste them into a scheduled Tweet-sending system like SocialOomph. Did I mention I LOVE this tool?
Twitter Tool #5: The Time-Waster, Spammer and Bot Finder (by TwitCleaner)
For those of you who truly believe your company only follows the best, brightest, and most valuable Tweeters in the industry, I have a challenge for you: run TwitCleaner on your account. I dare you. TwitCleaner is specifically designed to find and unfollow various Twitter undesirables, and I can say first-hand it does a remarkable job finding all of the bots, spammers, quote-of-the-dayers, serial Retweeters and dead accounts hiding among your follower base. If your company Twitter account follows less than 1,000 people (as most do) TwitCleaner even throws in the cleaning itself for free. But regardless of account size, the comprehensive TwitCleaner Report—automatically sent to you via Twitter Direct Message—is always run at no charge.
Do you use a free automated Twitter tool or applet you would like to promote? Please feel free to comment on this post. Otherwise a Retweet, Facebook Share, LinkedIn Share or other type of social share (handy buttons provided) would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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Author: Eric_Rudolf (76 Articles)
Eric Rudolf is Director of Marketing for one of the fastest-growing professional development and training companies in the world, as well as a featured small business writer for LegalZoom.com and RainToday.com—a major marketing and sales portal operated by the Wellesley Hills Group. Eric can be followed on LinkedIn or Twitter.
May 6th, 2010 at 10:53 am
I like Tweepi for flushing inactive followers and for finding the high link to conversation followers. It also allows me to look at your followers in a ’spreadsheet’ type dashboard so I can either follow them back en masse or individually based on educated decisions.
Off to check out Twitcleaner…
May 6th, 2010 at 11:01 am
I’m headed over to check this one out right now . . . sounds like a great tool. Inactive followers is something I would like to specifically target.
Thanks for sharing!
- Eric -
May 6th, 2010 at 11:24 am
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May 7th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Hi All:
Someone DMd me another tool this morning . . . it’s called “Twilk.” It allows you to use a collage of your followers as your Twitter background. It might not save you a ton of time, but it’s free–and it’s cool.
http://twilk.com/
Enjoy!
May 14th, 2010 at 5:15 am
Another great article – thank you for sharing – I will definately try a few of these applications – especially Twitter Tool #5: The Time-Waster, Spammer and Bot Finder (by TwitCleaner).
Anthony
May 14th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Hi Anthony:
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and feel free to come back and let us know what you think. Have a great weekend!
- Eric -
June 11th, 2010 at 4:38 am
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August 1st, 2010 at 9:54 pm
great article after taking a quick look at the applications will be back to check out more keep up the good work and thanks again for the great information.
August 2nd, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for stopping by, Shane. Feel free to forward the article to others as well–and good luck!
- Eric -
August 27th, 2010 at 3:34 am
Eric,
Nice listing! I would like to introduce a new desktop tool named TweetTwain, get it from http://tweettwain.com and let me know your comments.
Cheers,
Matt.
September 30th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I am not sure why anyone spends any of their valuable time worrying about whoever it is who follows them. Whether you’re followed by spammers or inactives or highly engaged contributors, it doesn’t really make a difference, does it?
The process of following people and then unfollowing whomever doesn’t return the follow sounds petty. You follow someone because you’re interested in what they tweet about. Whether or not they follow you back could be an indication your own tweets are not relevant to them.
Thanks for articles like this though. It’s always valuable to hear about tools that help organizations become more efficient.
September 30th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Hi Luis:
To me, the whole point of social networking is two-way communication. If I follow an alleged marketing guru who doesn’t return the favor, it tells me one important thing: they have absolutely no interest in hearing from me. With that in mind, why would I follow someone who isn’t interested in hearing my thoughts and feedback as well? Most companies want their Twitter accounts to become communities—not news feeds. To me, un-follow tools are as much about community building as they are about being petty.
Thanks for writing, and good luck!
October 1st, 2010 at 4:28 am
Why would you follow somebody who has no interest in hearing what you have to say? You may want to reconsider that position. There are all kinds of intelligent/interesting/funny/etc. people, both famous and normal, important and not as much, whose tweets you would find valuable on various levels, who don’t have the time or inclination to ever hear a word you have to say. If you unfollow them when they don’t follow you back you’re going to miss out on something rewarding. You can obviously use Twitter as you please, that’s just my answer to your question.
October 1st, 2010 at 10:33 am
I think you need to open up your thinking a bit. The point is, it all depends upon what the goals are for your account. If your goal is to treat your Twitter account like a Junior High, and only hang out with people who worship you, then you are correct–none of this is relevant. But marketing is all about trying to make new connections, and part of that is attempting to communicate with someone who may or may not want to hear from you. When it comes to communication, Twitter is a big cocktail party . . . you can either continue to hide in the corner and wait for people to approach you, or you can take a chance and proactively try to meet someone new once in awhile.
And on a side note, some people learn by following others, and some people learn by communicating with others. As famous as Guy Kawasaki might be, I have no interest in reading Tweets like “I like celery” or “The dangers of boozing and boinking.” If your goal is to be mentored by and learn from famous people 140 characters at a time, then your approach is 100% spot on.
November 10th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Thank you for #4!
As much as I enjoy FollowFriday it took the most time out of any of my social media tasks (besides writing). I was actually doing it the really long way. Any recommendations for one that would find your newest followers and compose ready-to-tweet list?
November 11th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Hi Giovanni–I have seen a number of mentions on Twitter about tools that add new followers to Lists, but I can’t say I’ve ever used one. Does anyone else have any input?