How To Use Tweet Adder 4

I’ve written before about what a powerful tool Tweet Adder can be in building your following on Twitter. I use it, of course, to find and reach out to potential readers and develop tighter relationships with existing ones, but it can be applied to nearly any business application. However, Tweet Adder 4, the latest version, comes with some modifications demanded by Twitter that take some getting used to. I’ve put together a few tips here on how to use it that will, I hope, help you continue to get the most out of this great bit of software.

The most critical change in Tweet Adder 4 is that the software no longer automatically follows and unfollows accounts. This was mandated by Twitter in a legal filing last year, I believe, against Tweet Adder and several other companies with “Twitter adder” type software as a move against inveterate spammers. While you can continue to run searches largely as you did in version 3, you actually have to click on a button in the search results list for each person you want to follow (or, alternately, discard from your follow list). The same is true for unfollowing accounts, although Tweet Adder has added some filter options to make that function a bit easier.

The rest of the functionality, particularly sending out automated tweets, thank you messages, DMs, and following people back who follow you first, remains largely the same.

So, you’re probably thinking, “Hey, they’ve just gutted this thing! Tweet Adder is useless now!”

Not so, my friend. Using it just takes a bit more time and a different workflow. True, it’s not just going to chug away in the background like it used to, but I’ve found a couple ways to maximize your gains for minimal time.

Let’s first start with unfollowing. If you click on the Not Following Back link in the left nav bar, you’ll see a list of people who, well, aren’t following you back. I have mine on the default setting of hiding users that I’ve followed within the last three days. In other words, anyone I follow through Tweet Adder has three days to follow me back. If they don’t, I figure they’re not interested (which is fine), so I unfollow them and move right along. While this process is no longer automated, it’s still pretty darn easy: you just click on the unfollow button for everyone in the list. Bzzt. I can zap a hundred accounts in a minute or so. Sometimes I’ll do ten or twenty, write a bit on my latest novel, then come back and zap some more. No sweat.

Following accounts is really a two-step process. First you have to run a search of some kind, then you have to manually follow the accounts that show up.

As of the time of this writing, the only search type that seems to work well for me is the standard tweet search. The Followers of a User search, which I used to use fairly often, consistently times and out no longer seems to work, and the other searches were ones that I never really found all that useful. Hopefully Tweet Adder will get those sorted out, but that’s okay — you can still make this thing hum with just the basic tweet search.

So, click on the Tweet Search link in the left nav pane. The fields you’ll find are the same as in version 3, with one glaring exception: the save search function is gone. This is sort of annoying, as it would be nice to be able to save your favorite searches and maybe click on a button to manually run them, rather than having to type them in or cut and paste from a text file into the keywords field. It’s not a huge deal, but it would be nice.

Anyway, one super-duper critical thing to get the most out of Tweet Adder 4 is to have very tight, focused keyword searches. What you want, ideally, is for your search results to contain only (or as close as you can get) accounts of people who might actually be interested in following you. I know that sounds obvious, but in version 4 it’s extra important, because if your results are very tight, you won’t have to scan the account details before you click the follow button. With tight results, you just leave your pointer hovering over the follow button and click-click-click. Another tip: I usually set the search results limit to 100. You don’t really need any more than that coming up.

“Hey, you cheater! That’s no better than automated following! You should be reviewing every account that you follow before you click that button, you heartless schmuck!”

Well, I may be a heartless schmuck, but I’m an efficient heartless schmuck. I know the people who come up in my results are very likely interested in following me back, because I can see in the search results, which display the latest tweet that your search criteria hit on, that we’ve got something in common. Maybe you’ve got a roofing company and you’ve got a list of people in your local area dealing with leaks in their roofs after a bad storm. They have a need, and you might be able to help them out. Commonality. My searches are so refined at this point that I don’t have to read every single tweet to know that these folks are likely to follow back. How do I know that? From extensive trial and error when I was refining my searches and checking every account before following them. Now it’s to the point that clicking on the follow button is merely a mechanical function that I now have to do myself, rather than Tweet Adder doing it for me. Click-click-click.

Now, you can do your click-o-mania in a couple different ways. The first is to follow people directly from the search results pane. The second, which I prefer, is to take the search results and add them to the Follow All Later list by clicking the button of the same name at the bottom of the search screen. Why would you want to do that? So you can run all your searches at one sitting, then come back throughout the day and work your way through the Follow Later List. For me, it’s an easier work flow, as I usually run several different searches, and it’s easier for me to do that all in one go.

Then you just click on the Follow Later List in the left nav pane, where your latest saved search results are all stored, and just click-click-click through the list.

Note: I have to express one caution/consideration with the click-click-click business. Twitter still doesn’t like large or fast changes in accounts. So do your clicking in batches periodically through the day so you’ll avoid hitting the various limits Twitter imposes.

So how long does it take to do all that clicking? I typically get through a couple/few hundred follows and unfollows every day in maybe five minutes or so (again, spread throughout the day). Now, keep in mind when looking at those numbers that my main account has almost 70,000 followers now; most accounts aren’t going to have nearly that much coming and going each day, which means that you won’t have to spend nearly as much time as I do fiddling with Tweet Adder.

The bottom line is that Tweet Adder 4 is still a very effective tool for building your Twitter following. Yes, it takes a bit of work now, as opposed to being set-and-forget like version 3, but I still consider it an absolutely vital tool for reaching out to potential new readers. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I believe you can still download a trial version for free and play around with it before you decide to buy. Check it out and see what you think!

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