Automated tweets are a real un-follow

[price engines]

Hi

I've been a quite enthusiastic supporter of Twitter for some months now - racking up a few hundred followers and 1000's of tweet's in the process.

Some days are 'busier' than others.

I've noticed lately a lot of chatter promoting automated tweets.

Has anyone had any success with this format?

To my mind, repetitive / automated tweets stand out like a sore thumb and nothing encourages me more to un-follow or block quicker.

So is there any value in automating? My own feelings are there is not (but I'd be delighted to hear otherwise).

Twitter is all about engaging our audience - I use my twitter feed to promote blog posts and website changes / offers etc more than for general chit-chat but a healthy mix is probably the most effective for growing a good following.

Over to you.

 

[cloudcity]

To be honest, I find twitter near worthless for engaging in conversations or contact building and not worth the time or effort. As a result I just automate my twitter accounts using the numerous free tools available on the net. I probably get 1 or 2 thousand followers a week and twitter traffic to some of my websites outperforms google. No suspended accounts so far... except one where I set up a yahoo pipe rt bot incorrectly and was retweeting my own tweets...

 

[givejonadollar]

I'm not sure what you mean by automating.

For instance, my facebook fan page, I have linked to twitter, which then links (posts) to myspace when I make a post on my facebook page.

Furthermore, my blog is integrated with my facebook fan page, so I don't have to log into my facebook if I don't need to.

Is this what you are talking about or something else?

 

[cloudcity]

Hi Jon,

Something else really, although I guess the principle's similar.

You've got an rss feed on your givejonadollar site, so you put your rss feed into twitterfeed (it's free) and you get it fed into your twitter account, so whenever you update your website, it'll update your twitter account with an automatic tweet. You could go a step further and set up twitterfeed to post to ping.fm (also free) and you would then be able to post automatically to your twiiter account, facebook, linkedin, plurk, blogger blog, wordpress blog and loads of other locations, by just updating your website.

Duplicate content isn't really an issue because the original content is on your website and the duplicate stuff is just being shown to multiple potential visitors across multiple platforms.

Hope that helps.

Paul.

PS, you won't see instant results because of the various differences in cron jobs, so if you add something to your website it might take an hour to appear on twitter, facebook or whatever. So it doesn't work so well for websites with live updating product prices for example