Twitter is my social network of choice by a distance — to this day it refers more traffic to this blog than any other source (bar Google).
A great deal of my success with Twitter can be put down to a piece of software called Tweet Adder; something I have raved about here on Leaving Work Behind before. However, a few weeks ago a radical update was introduced that has led many people to believe that it is nowhere near as effective as it once was.
But as far as I am concerned, Tweet Adder is still the best solution for growing your Twitter following. In this post I want to demonstrate that it still has a lot to offer (and give you the opportunity to
purchase it at a 20% discount). In fact,
I believe that Tweet Adder 4.0 is the best version yet.
If you want to know how to get more Twitter followers, I have all the answers for you in this comprehensive guide. Enjoy!
A Short History of Tweet Adder
For those of you who haven’t heard of Tweet Adder before, it is a piece of software (available for both Windows and Mac) that features various tools to help you to make the most of your Twitter profile.
It has historically been best known for its automated follow/un-follow feature, which enabled you to grow your Twitter following passively. The process was simple:
- You created a list of people to follow and Tweet Adder would automatically follow them via your Twitter account based upon set parameters (e.g. a hundred per day with each follow being separated by a period of three to six minutes).
- You set Tweet Adder to un-follow any Twitter user you followed who had not followed you back after a certain number of days.
A certain percentage of people you followed would follow you back and the rest would be un-followed (thus enabling you to follow more people). Un-following is arguably as important as following, as Twitter does not allow you to follow more people than are following you (beyond the first two thousand follows). Plus, following more people than there are people following you just looks plain spammy.
Although Tweet Adder has many more features,
its automated follow/un-follow feature was the jewel in the crown and the reason why most people used it. Although the program could be used to spam Twitter users, when used responsibly it provided an opportunity for users to reach more people interested in what they had to offer and provide value to the Twitter community.
In a nutshell, Tweet Adder version 3.x was an elegant and effective solution for people looking to increase their Twitter following and was central to the strategy I used to increase my
Twitter following to 10,000 in just one year.
Introducing Tweet Adder 4.0
However, further to
a legal settlement with Twitter, Tweet Adder’s functionality was changed drastically for version 4.0. The biggest change was
the removal of the automated follow/un-follow feature, which on the face of it seemed like a huge blow for Tweet Adder users.
As someone who has used Tweet Adder for a long time, rather than jump on the “Tweet Adder now sucks” bandwagon I thought I’d put the new version through its paces and see what it had to offer. I was rather pleased with what I found.
Yes — you can no longer automate follows and un-follows with Tweet Adder, but with a few tweaks made to my following strategy,
I have been able to match my previous performance with the new version.
Not only that, but Tweet Adder 4.0 has a bunch of exclusive new features that takes its functionality beyond what was previously offered. Although I am going to focus solely on what I consider to be best practice for growing your Twitter following with Tweet Adder in this post, it actually has a whole lot more to offer than what I am going to cover today.
So, if you are interested in growing your Twitter following and are happy to spare just a few minutes per day to do so, read on!
What to Expect From This Guide
When it comes to growing your Twitter following with Tweet Adder, there are two things you need to worry about which are both covered in this guide:
- How to Use Tweet Adder
- Your Strategy
The first step is pretty straightforward — just about anyone who is familiar with Twitter could pick up Tweet Adder and start using it. Nonetheless, I am going to go through the process in detail so nothing is left to chance.
The real challenge is in figuring out your strategy — who you should follow, how many you should follow/un-follow, and when. If you haven’t used Tweet Adder before then you may have no idea where to start. But I’m here to help on that front — I’ll give you all the information you need so that you can use Tweet Adder safely and productively.
Before We Begin…
Although Tweet Adder is extremely powerful and capable of boosting your Twitter profile’s growth exponentially, it is not a silver bullet solution. In order for it to work you will need to ensure that you have a quality Twitter profile that is actually worth following.
Put simply, there is little point in following people in the hope that they will follow you back if your profile isn’t actually worth following. Your Twitter profile should be well branded, lively and interactional.
Click here to learn more about building a quality Twitter profile.
Setting Up Tweet Adder
Tweet Adder is free to download but you must purchase a registration key in order to use it (click here to find out how you can purchase Tweet Adder with a 20% discount!). Once you have your key you’ll need to activate it in Tweet Adder:
- Click on the “Registration” tab
- Copy and paste your key into the “Registration #” field
- Hit the “Activate Licence Button”
Next you’ll need to add your Twitter profile to Tweet Adder:
- Click on the “Manage Users” tab
- Select your registration code at the bottom of the screen
- Type your Twitter username into the field near the bottom of the screen
- Click on “Add User”
You will be presented with a screen where you need to enter your Twitter password followed by an authorization code. By entering your password and the code you will be enabling Tweet Adder to access your account, but it will not make any changes unless you tell it to do so.
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to go!
How to Build a List of People to Follow
Before you start following people you will need to build a list of Twitter users who are likely to be interested in your profile. If you try to add people whose interests are not relevant to your site, you may find that you are reported as a spammer, which can lead to account suspension. As such, it is extremely important that you build a list of relevant people.
To do this you have six options, which are listed in the sidebar when you click on the “Manage Users” button followed by the name of the Twitter profile you want to work with.
Each of the options are relatively self-explanatory — they each search for specific data within Twitter to find relevant matches:
- Tweet Search: what people have tweeted
- Profile Data Search: what people have included in their profile
- Location Search: where people are located
- Followers of a User: who someone follows
- Followed by a User: who follows someone
- Twitter Lists: who is contained within a Twitter list
The benefits of each search method should be pretty obvious. Personally I am a fan of Profile Data Search and Followers of a User, but whichever option you chose to go with is up to you.
I’ll use the “Followers of a User” feature as an example. If I follow people who follow a Twitter user in my niche, I can expect to follow people with similar interests. All I need to do is enter that person’s Twitter username into the relevant field and hit the Search button:
Tweet Adder will search through the entire list of people following that Twitter user page by page (one hundred users per page) until it has (a) gone through the entire list or (b) you hit Stop. Either way, you will end up with a screen like this:
Regardless of which method you use to find Twitter users to follow, you will always end up with a screen like the one above.
You now have four options:
- Follow users immediately (one by one)
- Discard users (one by one)
- Choose to follow users later (one by one)
- Choose to follow users later (in bulk)
I recommend that you choose to follow users later, for reasons I’ll reveal when I discuss my strategy.
How to Follow People
On the assumption that you have selected the “Follow Later” option, you will now have a pool of Twitter users that you can follow. Doing so is very simple:
- Click on the “Follow Later List”
- Next to each user, click either “Follow” or “Discard” (to remove from the list)
At this point you have an option — to follow “indiscriminately” or make a conscious choice as to who you should follow. I’ll discuss the relative merits of each approach when I discuss my strategy, but for the meantime it may be helpful to know that you can alter what is displayed on screen to help you with any decisions you choose to make.
The most useful thing you can do is switch from viewing the last tweet a person made to their profile bio. You can do this by clicking on the drop down box near the top of the screen and clicking on the relevant option:
You’ll find that you can click on the “Follow” button repeatedly to follow a number of Twitter users very quickly. Alternatively, you can take your time and follow or discard profiles as you see fit.
How to Un-Follow People
Un-following people is arguably as important as following — without carrying out this vital step, you’ll soon run out of available follows “in the bank” and you won’t be able to follow anyone else.
Much like when it comes to building a list of people to follow, you have multiple options for un-following people based upon various criteria:
For the most part the options are self-explanatory but some do require clarification:
- Not Following Back: people you have followed that are not following you back
- UnFollowed Me: people who once followed you but have now un-followed you
- No Profile Image: profiles with no image (common amongst spammers)
- Foreign Language: profiles that are not written in your language
- High Ratio: people that are following more people than they have following them
- Inactive: people who haven’t tweeted for a set period of time
- Talkative: people who tweet a lot
- Quiet: people who rarely tweet
Some of these options are only useful if you want to take a fine tooth comb to your followings and manually filter out unwanted profiles. Generally I stick with the following methods:
- Not Following Back
- UnFollowed Me
- Inactive
I think that these three options cover most bases — it’ll get rid of people who haven’t followed me, who no longer want to follow me, and who are barely on Twitter anyway. That gives me plenty of room to add new follows — the rest can stay.
Once you have selected an option, un-following people is very similar to following them — just click the “UnFollow” button.
You also have an option to “Whitelist”:
Once someone is on your Whitelist, you can’t un-follow them (unless of course you remove them from your Whitelist).
You will also notice options at the bottom of some methods that will be self-explanatory. For instance, you will have the following options at the bottom of the “Not Following Back” screen:
How you set these options is up to you, but I would recommend them as set in the screenshot above.
Bringing It All Together (My Tweet Adder Strategy)
Now you know everything you need to know about using Tweet Adder, let’s talk tactics. I have been using Tweet Adder for a long time now and have honed my strategy down to a fine point. I had to adjust that strategy slightly for the new update, but for the most part it is the same.
In short,
the more followers you have the more loose and fast you can be with Tweet Adder. When you’re just getting started you may want to pay more care and attention what you are doing, but once you have the momentum up you can choose to make it a task that takes just five minutes (or less) per day.
With the above in mind, I am going to offer up two strategies below: one for Twitter profiles with less than 1,000 followers and one for Twitter profiles with more than 1,000 followers. I’ll follow those up with some frequently asked questions that are relevant to both strategies.
1. Using Tweet Adder on Small Twitter Profiles
If you have a small Twitter profile then you have two priorities:
- Get more followers
- Follow people very selectively
The reasoning behind this approach is straightforward:
- If you get more followers then you can follow more people.
- If you follow people very selectively (i.e. only if you think there is a good chance of them following back) then you’ll get more followers (which means you can follow more people).
Ideally you will be attracting people from outside of Tweet Adder to help you with your cause. It is not within the scope of this post to explain how you can do that, but a few simple ideas are:
- Get all of your friends and family to follow you
- Add links to Twitter from your blog
- Ask your email subscribers to follow you
- Ask your followers on other social media networks to follow you
You want to develop as big a “base” as possibile in order to make it easier to develop your following with Tweet Adder. Don’t worry if you can only attract a handful of followers —
no matter how small your profile is to start with, you can grow it in time. Please note that I do not recommend that you follow more people than you have following you (for reasons I will discuss later).
When it comes to following people, I recommend Tweet Search as the best option for your circumstances. You want to find and follow people who are talking about your topic
right now. This can result in very high conversion rates.
This was a search for “interested in freelance writing”.
You may even want to re-tweet their tweets or send them a personalised tweet after you have followed them to capture their attention.
The un-following procedure is straightforward — I recommend that you utilize the methods I suggest under the
How to Un-Follow People heading above. You may want to pad those methods out with the other options (such as people with no profile photo) if you’re getting close to your follow limit and need to find a way to dump some extra follows.
This process may sound quite long-winded but in reality
it’s going to take you just a few minutes per day once you get into the flow of it, and there is no better way of building a Twitter profile. Each person you follow and engage with is a potential new reader of your blog — these people are literally waiting for you to find them!
2. Using Tweet Adder on Larger Twitter Profiles
This is the strategy I use — it’s quick and easy and takes no more than a few minutes per day to complete.
The first step is to
build a to follow list from the followers of another user (who is of course relevant to your own profile). This is the quickest and easiest way to get your hands on a large number of people in one go. You’ll want to build a list of enough people to last you a week — I clear the list and create a new one (with a new Twitter user) every Monday. This reduces the likelihood of adding a bunch of people who are no longer active on Twitter.
You’ll want a long list of Twitter users in your niche so that you can cycle through them with a long enough gap before you get back around to the first user again. For instance, my list has thirty Twitter profiles on it and is always growing.
Once you have built your list, you should
follow and un-follow approximately the same number of people every day. I recommend that you use the same un-follow methods I suggest under the
How to Un-Follow People heading above.
How Many People Should You Follow/Un-Follow in a Day?
This is the million dollar question and there is no right answer.
One thing is for certain (in my opinion):
you will not get into trouble if you follow and/or un-follow less than a hundred people per day. The following quote is directly from Twitter’s “
Following rules and best practices“:
…if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine.
To me that makes it clear that Twitter are after people following and/or un-following in excess of several hundred people per day. And since Tweet Adder is no longer an automated following/un-following service, there’s nothing to worry about on that front.
So you can use ninety-nine as a benchmark to start with. Having said that,
if you have a very small Twitter profile I would recommend that you stick to following less people than follow you — anything more looks spammy and will probably be a turn off to people considering following you. To be honest, there is probably a natural ceiling on the number of people you can follow which is below the number you would be comfortable with anyway.
At the time of writing I have approximately 15,000 Twitter followers and I follow between 300-400 people per day. Back when it was 5,000 I followed around 200 per day. I know people who have followed more but those are the numbers I am comfortable with.
At the end of the day it is up to you to decide what you are comfortable with.
We can debate all day about limits that Twitter has, but I believe that if you have a good quality profile and you’re following people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer, the likelihood of your account being compromised is extremely small.
Should You Space Follows/Un-Follows Out?
This again comes down to a perception of risk management.
In a perfect world you would space your follows and un-follows out to make them seem as “natural” as possible, but you don’t want to spend all day on Tweet Adder, do you?
My compromise has been to split my follows into three “sessions” per day in which I follow and un-follow between 200-300 people (in total) per session. I do it when I start work in the morning, before I head off for lunch, and before I finish for the day. Each session typically takes me less than two minutes, so around five minutes per day in total.
How Risky Is Tweet Adder?
It is extremely unlikely that your profile will get banned in the first instance from using Tweet Adder’s follow/un-follow features. It is
more likely that you will get suspended, but still unlikely in my opinion.
The evidence I have for this is based upon my own personal experience (having grown four separate profiles using Tweet Adder) and the fact that I have not once had someone email me telling me that they got banned through using Tweet Adder.
If you get suspended then you may want to reconsider your use of Tweet Adder. Until that point I wouldn’t worry about it.
Is Tweet Adder Still Worth It?
When Tweet Adder was an automated service, most internet marketers waxed lyrical about its capabilities. It was truly brilliant — I know for a fact that
my Twitter account would be nowhere near as big as it is without it
But for the most part, Tweet Adder is still the same program. In fact, it now has a bunch of new features that make it even more valuable. The fact that you now have to spend an extra five minutes per day on a task that was once automated has been blown way out of proportion by many.
For everyone who has been screaming that Tweet Adder is now useless due its lack of automation, I ask why they can’t find five minutes per day to generate exponential growth of their Twitter account when they’ll spend far more time on other less effective marketing techniques. It makes no sense to me.
If they really feel that it is that much of a chore then they could outsource it for pennies.
I still think Tweet Adder is the best solution for building your Twitter profile and one of the best online marketing tools that I’ve ever used. If you want to know how to get more Twitter followers then Tweet Adder is the answer. Quite frankly, if you want to build a bigger Twitter profile and you’ve read this far and
still decide not to use it, I think you’re crazy. But I still love you
Purchase Tweet Adder With a 20% Discount!
In preparation for this post I emailed the developer of Tweet Adder, Jamie, and asked if he would be willing to offer my readers a discount on the software. He very kindly confirmed that he would be delighted to offer a whopping 20% discount!
Here’s what you need to do:
- Click here to visit the Tweet Adder website
- Hit the “Buy Now” button
- Select what licence you would like
- On the checkout screen enter the coupon code TE20 (without the quotation marks)
With this discount you can pick up Tweet Adder for just $44 — that is a ridiculously small price to pay for
the solution to building a huge Twitter following. I just wish similar products were available for every social media network!
Questions and Comments Are Welcomed
I know that I have covered a lot of ground in this post. You may well have questions and/or comments regarding Tweet Adder and/or my strategy, all of which are welcomed in the comments section. Fire away below and I’ll be happy to get back to you!
Purchase Tweet Adder here.
