Are you a Tweet Manager, a Twitter User or Both?

Allow me to ask the question to anyone reading..

Are you a Tweet manager or a Twitter user? Can you be both? If you’re a Tweet manager, you’ll know all about what I’m going to talk about. If you’re a Twitter user, a human being and a human doing then you’ll probably, hopefully not go anywhere near all this.. I don’t agree with it myself but can understand there being uses and needs which are being met. How ethical those needs are is a whole different blog post entirely! (I never realised I was so fascinated with ethics!)

I’ve got absolutely no problems in mentioning it by name, some would and have said that I’m giving the service free publicity. Maybe so, I believe however that it’s up to the individual to make that choice.  Feel free to check it out for yourself at Tweet Manager

So there you have it, above are the main ‘features’ of Tweetmanager.com –

1) Auto follow users based on specific key words. (Turning a manual, discovery based, enjoyable tool in to an automated, robotic and faceless beast where you don’t know whether you’re connecting with a human or a bot.)

NB. I enjoy the manual process of finding and following. I follow someone based on personal parameters, of which a robot would not ever be able to do. If someone was to think that it wasn’t me choosing to follow them but a bot doing so because they had used certain key words any credibility I had would be shot to pieces.

2) Mass Message – Sending any message to 1,000 or less users at the same time. There is no two ways about it, this to me is spamming. As a personal user, I can’t see there ever being a time when you would have the desire or need to want to send the same message to up to 1,000 people. It’s spamming, pure and simple. PRO’s – Please exercise tact and humility, don’t use this tool to mass message.

3) Auto Reply – Set automatic canned responses to people who @ reply you. I’m not sure how this is meant to work, at all, ever. No one person is like a drone who says the same thing over and over again. If you know someone like that you’re quickly going to walk away aren’t you? Why do the same online then? There’s a question of relevancy for starters, one message to one person is not applicable to the other.

4) Auto Post – No. Just No.

5) Feed – This I know has it’s uses. The most popular / well known is probably Twitterfeed. When Jed Hallam went away for a week on holiday recently for example, it was as if he was still there, knocking out great content. Instead, he wasn’t physically doing so, Twitterfeed was. Jed had written some articles up before hand and set a day and a time for Twitterfeed to broadcast them to his followers. A genius idea I thought. I like this. I’m just wary of someone / a brand having a page on Twitter where all they do is automate content through Twitterfeed. That’s great that there’s content there in the first place but Twitter is about getting involved with conversations on a human level. If someone asks a question and you can answer it, go ahead. It’s a fluid tool because you can dip in and out of it asking, answering questions along with learning about new articles that others have recommended or sharing a useful link with others.

6) Dual Manage – Similar to the ‘Feed’ above, this has it’s uses. The most popular of the moment is probably Splitweet. Having used it myself, it’s actually really useful if you use / manage more than one Twitter account. It’s positioned as a brand monitoring tool, but I actually use it just to keep a track of different Twitter accounts and is one place where I keep all the info required.

So what are the types of people using Tweetmanager? Well, for the most part they are I’m hoping using it for good and not for such activities like taking short cuts and massively trying to increase follower numbers over a very short space of time. Or for spamming their followers with sales messages. Or setting a bot to post for you with continuous canned responses.

Question, Ok, a few questions. – Does using a tool like Tweet Manager make you a pro-active Twitter user? Does achieving organic numbers mean you’re non-proactive? Is being non-proactive actually a bad thing? I pride myself on the amount of people following me being completely organic, built up over a period of time.

Although you can’t automate the process of people following you, you can automate following people and that’s what I don’t agree with.

I’m not here to compete.