I got asked by a client who makes a great deal of their income off traffic from Twitter to look for a replacement for Tweet Adder, since they’ve recently made themselves both compliant with Twitter’s TAC and completely useless to this client, all in one fell swoop. Apparently Twitter wants to make it very hard to use tools to automate processes. Basically, It’s pretty grim out there for Twitter marketers right now, as one after another Twitter tool goes away because Twitter paints all tools with the same brush, whether they’re spam-related or not.
Basically, the best tool out there for automating the process of keeping your following and follower lists relevant, helping you to follow people who would be good to follow and automatically unfollowing people who are dead weight just went away.
Why, you ask? Because Twitter felt they were in violation of the TAC. Oy vey. Really?
Basically, in order to not violate the TAC, my clients are supposed to hand-cull a list of 20,000 people to find the dead weight themselves, one person at a time, and manually remove them, and hand-search every day for people who are talking about my client’s service, rather than automate that so that we can focus on the quality of the tweets the client puts out, on the quality of the conversation?
Anyway, now that Tweet Adder 4 is out (still a great tool, for small or simple clients, but the automation is gone and that’s ALL this particular client needed it for), I’m busy trying to locate a decent replacement.
Again, I’m not looking for a way to automate the process of TWEETING, just following and cleaning house. (For tweeting, just use Tweet Adder, Hootsuite, both of which are still okay for that, and maybe “Tweet Old Post” a good WordPress plugin for you bloggers.)
Here are the potential replacement softwares for now…
1. Hummingbird: $69.97
http://hummingbird4twitter.com/
2. This software MIGHT do it, the documentation is a bit vague. My guess… no.
http://sproutsocial.com/features
$39 a month
The monthly subscription model turns me off. I already have to use HootSuite at $7 a month. And really, honestly, I’m not interested in auto debits for more than one twitter tool. : / They’d have to do a better job of telling me why I want their tool first.
Looks like they keep everything in an online dashboard and there isn’t much automation, mostly analytics and monitoring tools. Great tools, but probably not useful enough for the price tag on a one-off client basis.
3. For the one-off client, one account, one computer, Tweet Demon sounds like a good tool, but you’d really have to decide NOT to use some of the more spammy features.
http://tweetmarketingrobot.su/
It’s operating on SU for peet’s sake. Fishy. Although…. looks like if controlled carefully, keeping it from doing the more spammy stuff, it would accomplish the job. But ONE account, ONE computer. A pain in the butt. (Unless you’ve got a bunch of virtual machines running like some of my savvy pals.)
4. http://www.tweetspice.com/
Looks like a nearly perfect duplicate of Tweet Adder… About $50 for a single license, $100 for multi.
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Free things we can do to help strengthen Twitter:
1. Make sure IFTTT is set up properly.
https://ifttt.com/
2. Write better blog posts, and use the Tweet Old Posts plugin to promote them into perpetuity.
Hi Desi!
Thanks for the good article. I am still reeling from Tweetadders’s death. Loved the program. Now I am on the hunt for a new one. I will check out your suggestions.
You are absolutely right about Tweet Old Post. It is a MUST HAVE! It consistently increases traffic as our twitter following grows. And so simple to set up.
Cheers!
John
What about TweetBoss? It does the same thing as TweetAdder did
Sounds like it could work… Anyone out there using this? http://allmediasoftware.com/tweetbossoffer
Hi guys, great article! Very fun to read. I’ve been using http://www.tweetfavy.com/ for a while to boost the followers on my Twitter profile. It’s great stuff, you should check it out!