I’ve been playing around with Tweet Adder today and am trying to determine if this is a program I should purchase or not. So far all the reviews I’ve been reading have been positive, but to be honest it just feels a little like black hat SEO to me.
The idea of automating who I follow seems to be counter-intuitive to the whole idea of social networking. That being said I began my trial this morning and have so far been impressed with some of the features at first glimpse.
How Tweet Adder Works
Ok so here are a few screen shots from Tweet Adder. Once you’ve associated your account/ accounts in the Tweet Adder admin you can do a keyword search. I chose to search through profiles as I figured anyone who had any of my search terms in their profile were more than likely going to better fall within my niche. Notice in the screen shot below there are a number of different search criteria.
First off you can search for Twitter users by keyword either in their profiles or in their posts both recent and historical. This way you’re at least aiming towards a targeted audience.
I did a keyword search for, “social-networks”, and got 1500 results. I believe this is the default minimum as I also did a search for, “web-design”, and garnered the same number. however, shouldn’t this be done one at a time to insure the site I’m subscribing to is relevant?
Below you can see the, “Follow”, panel where you can set up how many users you want to follow. This number could be zero if you wanted. There’s also a time delay between follows option which to me…feels like your trying to pull a fast one.
Here’s a sample of what the, “Unfollow”, panel looks like. Again I don’t understand how blanketly unfollowing an arbitrary number of users pans out. This feels like a ditch effort to try and not be black listed by Twitter if you garner too many followers too quickly. Does this feel Black hatty to anyone else?
Below is the Scheduled Tweet panel. This is interesting to me as I would like to see how this affects my traffic in different parts of the world if I were to post tweets in the middle of the night from the US. Here you can set as many tweets to go out at what ever interval you choose. The one thing about this that feels Black Hat to me is the fact that you could set the program to rewteet the same post over and over again for as long as you wanted to. You can even set up a number of different posts to go out in a determined time frame retweeting from a group of selected tweets. This just feels like Twitter spam to me.
You can also schedule when to send tweets out and automate posting. This article here is from marketingflop.com, a blog based in Norway. This blogger noticed he was getting a lot of traffic from America and wanted to tweet his posts while he was sleeping. I’ve been experimenting with times of day to post to see if there is a prime time for my site to garner the most traffic. With Google Live Search I think we’re going to see this is more important than ever.
Here’s a look at the scheduling panel in Tweet Adder.
In this panel you can declare how you wish to deal with Direct Messages. Again this is a social network. Don’t you want to receive these and reply to them individually?
Why It Feels Like Black Hat SEO
So in summation the following bullets are why this program feels so Black Hat or at the very least Gray Hat SEO to me.
- The idea of bulk adding followers through a social network seems counter-intuitive
- Time delays between adding friends seems like a black hat move.
- The bulk unfollow option feels like a quick fix to a possible black listing.
- Automate redundant ReTweets of a singe post or posts.
- Bulk handling of direct messages.
That being said, I haven’t read a bad review yet. I just feel like in my heart of hearts when you automate something like this you will in the end up screwing yourself some how. Time will tell.
About Me: I've been a web slinger for over 11 years now. I'm particularly interested in web design, search engine optimization and social networking. Check out my site for new tips, tricks, tutorials, and industry news. Come on in the web is fine. 
Nate Balcom on 
I used similar services in the very beginning of my blogging and I had the same feeling. I ended up following a ton of people I didn’t want to follow or had no interest in. It helped grow things at first, but I’ve found it’s much better generating followers the good old fashioned way. Besides, if we all continue to cheat the system, the idea of “Twitter Followers” will become insignificant.
Now, the only automation I have set up is to follow people who follow me – I figure that’s a fair practice.
I don’t know if I would call it black hat SEO, but I would call it spamming, I used it once (as in one time). And found the actual quality of my followers was really low, nobody really cared about what I posted.
The only way to be good on Twitter is to actively communicate and retweet relevant information. Engage in dialogue with people who actually follow you back. I don’t see anything wrong with a bulk unfollow, because hey, we are all trying to network here aren’t we? There are other places to do that though.
I think if someone follows you on twitter from your area (geographic or expertise) you should automatically follow them back otherwise, you are that cool kid in class who only follows a few people, and thinks they are better than everyone else.
Follow those of like mind, interact with them, offer relevant information, and you will master twitter. That being said, don’t self promote too much, it’s been shown that Twitter is a better place to brand a person than an actual product.
Hello Austin,
I feel the same way. I only follow people I am truly interested in. I don’t know how you can maintain a truly social network with too many people. With that said every review I’ve read about Tweet Adder was positive. I tried the free trial, but couldn’t really get behind automating something like this. It just seems like a bad practice to me.
Hello Keller,
I’m more interested in good web practices. Automation just seems like a bit of trickery that will be banned by the major SE’s in the future. I’m kind of surprised Google hasn’t set a policy for these type of programs yet. Only a matter of time IMHO.