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The Twitter Auto-Follow accounts list…

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The Twitter Auto-Follow List …is deprecated. When I started this project a couple of months ago, Twitter was in its early stages and far from being as spam-flooded as now. While the system worked perfectly for a couple of month, at some points more and more users began turning off the auto-follow feature as an increasing number of spam accounts became more and more annoying. Keeping in mind the current state of Twitter, such an auto-follow list doesn't make sense any more, so I decided to remove the list.

But the increasing success of Twitter did not only show us the downsides of tweet-spam but also produced a couple of very interesting mash-ups. In the Last weeks I found out that TweetLater Pro's brand-new “FriendFinder” feature and Pretty Link Pro's Pretty-Bar are the two most efficient strategies if you want to increase your followers with targetted micro-bloggers and leave spammers and feed-accounts out in the cold. Take a look, TweetLater, an online-mash-up service as well as Pretty Link, a WordPress plugin for using your own domain as a URL-shortener, are available in free trial versions:

tweetlater-250x250prettylink-250x250

For historical reasons…

…I've left the old text online. Thanks for visiting – I'll keep a sharp eye on our favorite micro-blogging service and I will keep you updated about my experiences (by now I run one of the largest European accounts with more than 30k followers. Feel free to follow me; I don't auto-follow any more, but I take a short look at the timelist of all new contacts and follow back everybody who has something interesting to say:

twitter.com/datadirt

Like all web 2.0 services, twitter works best on a give-take (reciprocal) basis. That's why I am starting this list which will help you to build a lot more twitter followers much faster than you usually could, and it's a great way to promote your own account, too! There are a couple of services out there that offer an auto-follow option meaning that you automatically follow every new user who follows you. This is a list of such accounts – which basically means that all you have to do is follow those guys and you are sure to increase your twitter-followership very fast, which is extremely useful if you start new accounts. Update: I have a done a major update today (2009-04-26) and split the list into three sublists: English, German and other accounts. This will make the list a lot more usable as it keeps growing and growing. Also, I've added a mini-FAQ: please read and save you and me some time.

To make targeted following a little easier, I added a couple of additional info. Every entry consists of a link to the twitter account, three tags that specify the general topical field of the account and finally and optional language entry which only applies to twitterers who are not tweeting in English. Being part of this list of course means that you will gain many followers yourself – the longer this list, the greater the gain for all tweet-geeks involved.

datadirt updates via twitter: @datadirtrss

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dsrss-twittericon_biggerI'm not too big a fan of mixing personal twitter accounts with automated postings, so I set up a dedicated twitter account for this task. If you prefer to receive datadirt postings via tweet, just follow @datadirtrss. Of course I'll continue to use my personal acccount @datadirt for manual updates, while the frog-bot will send out automated updates via the new account.

Of course I set the profile to auto-follow – by the way, let me remind you of the twitter auto-follow accounts list, which keeps growing and gives you some instant followers (which is especially useful if you're starting a new twitter account and want to “polish” the numbers a bit: it's a psychological issue, as most users won't follow an account which has less than 10 followers).

If you run a WordPress blog and want to set up your own posting-bot, this is what you have to do:

  1. Set up a fresh twitter account.
  2. Optional: use tweetlater to set up account automation. (I highly recommend auto-follow for bot-accounts!)
  3. Optional: Upload an avatar, adjust the twitter colour settings and design your own background – you'll find plenty inspiration at twitterbacks.com.
  4. Install Alex King's Twitter Tools on your blog. The plugin automatically sends a tweet every time a new post goes live. (Optionally, you can can also use Twitter Tools to post an entry every time you send out a tweet and/or show the latest tweets in your sidebar.)
  5. Actually, there's no fifth step – but you need some followers, right? At this point you should think about how you can promote your new twitter-bot on your blog. Usually, it's a good idea to place a button in your sidebar.
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So good luck with all your twitter endeavours – seems like building an additional traffic stream always pays off!

PS – Note to twitter-spammers: I realized that many accounts follow fellow tweeters who have their account on auto-follow. After waiting till they receive the follow-back love, they quickly unfollow. I regularly (about twice a month) go through my “following” list anyways – I simply used to kick out the bottom-feeders, but since many are trying more than once, I've started blocking everyone who unfollows me quickly after the follow. And I urge you to do the same if you want to keep your account clean.

TweetLater: New autofollow approval feature

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tllogoAuto-follow is a great feature for twitter, because it helps you save a lot of time. On the other hand though, plenty users are afraid of automatically following the likes of spam-bots and such. TweetLater, one of my favorite one-stop-shop twitter mash-up, updated their auto-follow feature today: users may now chose to moderate who to follow and who to keep a respectful distance from. It's called “vet new users” and you have to turn it on once if you're already using a TweetLater account.

And if you use twitter to market your page, you probably already do – besides from the auto-follow, TweetLater offers a couple of other nice features like scheduled tweets and multi-account administration. The new moderation features puts potential auto-follows in a queue first and lets you take a peek before making a decision:

In keeping with TweetLater's mission to provide Twitter productivity tools, I have added a feature where you can still configure your Twitter account for auto-follow and/or auto-welcome, but that allows you to manually vet new followers before your desired actions are executed.
TweetLater keeps a new follower on hold for 72 hours so that you can log in to TweetLater and tell us what you want to do. If you don't log in and record your decision within 72 hours, TweetLater will go ahead and apply your selected automation options. This is done so that new followers don't pile up and you having to wade through hundreds of approval pages if there's a period of time that you cannot do the manual vetting.
You have three options with each follower, namely: a) approve, b) ignore, or c) block.

To me, twitter definitely is a two-way street: I just love the auto-follow feature, and I don't use the new approval system, as Socialtoo.com's Auto-Unfollow feature basically achieves the same results without me having to invest any time. But for those who like to carefully chose who they follow, it's a great add-on, especially since TweetLater puts all new followers from all accounts into one big list. And this is how to turn on the new feature:

  1. Log in to TweetLater;
  2. Click the Accounts button in the sidebar;
  3. Click the Automate button for your Twitter account;
  4. Scroll down and click the “Manually Vet New Followers” option box; and
  5. Click the Save button.

From now on you can click on the “main” button in the sidebar, and then on the “Vet New Followers” link in the menu to see if there are already new followers waiting for you to vet.

tlvetnew

Good luck building your twitter-followership! Micro blogging is a great conversion tool, but requires a lot of manual work. So any mash-ups that take the hassle out of boring “farming quests” are highly welcome.