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Mr. Tweet: find those like-minded folks

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mtbannerOf all twitter add-on services, Mr. Tweet has surprised me most during the last week. That basic aim of the service is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be interested in. Since twitter is still growing so rapidly, topic-specific selection becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I'm quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter's “backlink factor”, Mr. Tweet introduces a well thought-through recommendation system.

Basically, Mr. Tweet is one of those services you have to trust enough to hand over your twitter account data – that's the one thing I don't quite like about it, yet still the surplus value is great. On each twitter users profile page a number of statistical data presents an overview of the type of twitter who's at work here: Updates per day, percentage of conversations, posted links plus additional notes (like “usually follows back”) give a better impression about the realness/spammyness of any account:

mrtweet

And there's more: the service regularly provides very interesting twitter tutorials as well as suggestions for new follows – and these work really well in comparison to what Twitter itself has to offer:

Twitter's suggestions for me include a grocery store, the microblog of an online shoe store CEO and a mommy blogger. On the other hand, Mr. Tweet has actually recommended people I have met or at least know professionally.

The founders of the company refer to their service as a personal networking agent, yet while this label sounds a bit exaggerated, some truly juicy candy is hidden inside the recommendation system: Mr. Tweet encourages its users to ask for recommendations by other users and to issue these to their own favorites users. Such recommendations are tweets which look like this:

#MrTweet I recommend @username because [insert reason here]

Not only do these messages raise awareness for ones account, their overall number is also used by Mr. Tweet's follower algorithm which determines the follow-suggestions. Besides, you get to know some nice bits and pieces about other tweepers – so in other words: please go to Mr. Tweet and recommend me! :mrgreen:

Since I really like the service and the idea, I'll recommend one of my favorite twitter friends each day for the next two weeks. Using Tweetlater, that's a breeze – even the scheduling option of the free version are great, but to harness the full power of pre-tweeting, I highly recommend the pro version, which enables you to schedule replies and direct messages.

Want some recommendation love? Since I'm a big fan of reciprocal network building, of course I'll gladly return to favor if you write a recommendation for me!

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.
twitscreen

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.