The most important element of Twittering for your business is to update with tweets regularly, the single most important aspect of maximizing your Twitter account for your business, but it can be a monumental task for small business owners. Most people setup their Twitter accounts and then just let them die on the vine. Whatever you do, don’t let this happen.
When utilized in the right way, Twitter is a remarkable opportunity for small business owners, offering one of the most uniquely effective ways to build your sphere of influence in your industry niche, to listen to what your customers and competitors are saying in real-time, and ultimately, providing you with an unfettered opportunity to grow your business in a whole new way.
Like so many small business owners, tweeting (as it’s called) on a daily basis might seem like a daunting task. Luckily, there are a few outstanding 3rd party Twitter applications that can help you manage, maintain and get the most out of your Twitter account without you having to watch your Twitter feed updates 24 hours a day.
I’m going to talk about two of my very favorite third party Twitter applications in this regard:
- Hummingbird
- TweetLater SocialOomph (TweetLater was recently renamed SocialOomph)
Hummingbird
Hummingbird (from TwitAddict and Mesabi Labs) is a Twitter automation tool that allows you to manage and grow your Twitter ‘following’ (as its called) in a very efficient way. Actively growing and managing your Twitter account is a critical part of getting the most out of Twitter for your business. Seeding and growing your list of followers with active Twitter participants within your industry niche is essential for success. Hummingbird is one of the best Twitter third party applications available to do just that. As a desktop application, Hummingbird can automate much of the heavy lifting required in building and managing your Twitter following.
Here are just a few of the things that Hummingbird offers:
- Gives you the ability to reach thousands of highly targeted followers and prospective customers, hands free
- Powerful automated following engine that can help you quickly build your Twitter following and authority in your specific niche
- Automatically pauses when you’ve hit Twitter’s follow limits, keeping you notified & safe from following too many people at one time (which can get your account suspended by Twitter)
- Automates the follow and unfollow process for you – saving you a ton of time.
Following Limits - There is one thing to watch out for with Hummingbird, however. Twitter has started to closely monitor “aggressive” Twitter followers and has started to sharply restrict the total number of followers that any one account can follow at a time. New Twitter accounts are restricted to no more than 2K people until the account has reached roughly the same ‘reciprocal’ number of followers. Once you finally do obtain your first 2000 followers, Twitter will then start letting you follow more than the initial limit of 2000 people. The latest version of Hummingbird is setup technically to stay within the daily follow limits defined by Twitter but it does not allow you to select a specific number of follow requests to be conservative and well below Twitter’s daily count limits. Even though Hummingbird is built to stay within Twitter’s daily follow limits, you should be very careful in your follow requests early in your Twitter account development with Hummingbird. With Hummingbird, you should try to limit your ‘follow count’ to 200-250 per day at the most, at least early in your Twitter account history. You can do this manually in Hummingbird by stopping your following by hitting the “Stop” button after reaching that 200-250 follow count limit.
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