Oneupweb Reviews: Tweet Later Automating Twitter
Is Twitter making you feel a little unproductive?
Twitter can be an important part of managing your brand and your company’s reputation. As a result, many of us spend hours of our day monitoring and sending Tweets and following “Tweeple.” That amounts to a lot of time glued to your desktop, laptop or cell phone.
Now, there’s a way to make yourself just a little more productive while still managing your Twitter account.
The Tweet Later application automates responses, letting you schedule regular Tweets, unfollow and follow Tweeple and send welcome messages to those new followers.
Scheduling Tweets takes almost as much time as quickly texting a Tweet or two. Despite this, it’s useful for those times when you need to shut off your computer or cell phone, or when you need to concentrate on something other than Twitter.
Another great feature is being able to send automated messages to Tweeple who follow you. This is a great opportunity to thank and notify new followers about where else they can find your business.
Adding a website, mentioning your Facebook account, encouraging people to sign up for your newsletter, read your blog, or notifying them of an up and coming tradeshow: all these activities can help engage and further strengthen the connections that create brand enthusiasts.
Our marketing department likes this application. Not so much for the ability to automate Tweets, but for being able to set keyword alerts similar to Google Alerts. Something as simple as setting a keyword alert for your business name lets you chime in on any conversation about your company.
This Oneupweb alert is just one example.
Tweet Later alerts you about a keyword by emailing a link to the commenter’s Twitter stream. Finding those comments can be tough if your commenter has a lot of Twitter activity.
All of these basic features are free and being used by 32,500 Tweeple, according to the Tweet Later website. TechCrunch doesn’t have much history about this application outside of Compete data that shows the site has soared in unique visits. TweetLater.com went from a flat line in February 2008 to a steady climb in December 2008. Monthly unique visitors were 141,836 in February 2009.
Unfortunately, and this may be a game killer, this site isn’t without its technical difficulties. Tweet Later experienced problems accessing Twitter’s API in late March and at the time of this post those problems were still in Twitter’s court. Twitter is eliminating auto-follow capabilities, according to a TechCrunch blog post, which also states there is no telling how that will impact third party services that offer this feature.
With the problems this site is experiencing and Twitter’s dislike of auto-follow, purchasing the more advanced Tweet Later Professional with automated Twitter bots is probably a bad idea.
Even though our marketing department has found the basic services somewhat useful for monitoring basic keywords, you may want to forgo this application. The fact that Twitter is frowning on follow-backs means you probably shouldn’t tempt yourself with an application relying upon such a feature.
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