At a growth rate of 40% per month, Twitter has arrived as a major player on the social media scene. Companies like Dell and Woot.com are using it to help sell $millions leveraging thousands of customers tuned into their “tweets”.

More business oriented than Facebook, Twitter provides a way to build a following, nurture relationships with those followers, and potentially land new customers. One of the more prolific Twitter users, Guy Kawasaki of All-Top fame, has called Twitter.com “a weapon”, and for good reason. Used correctly, it can be the most powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.

One aspect which makes Twitter marketing so powerful is that you can easily find niche markets by locating the leaders or authorities of an industry and following their followers, which could be in the thousands. Many of those will follow you in return, especially if your content is relevant to their interests. For example, use Twitter’s find people tool to find “software” and you will find large lists of folks interested in software.

The bad news is, like Facebook and others, it takes time to run a solid Twitter marketing strategy. Following the followers of authorities you find will take hours and is often outsourced to virtual assistants.

Enter Hummingbird Twitter Automation Software

Mesiab Labs has recently released powerful software that is ideal for those who want to automate much of the manual labor involved in working with Twitter. Called Hummingbird, it automates this task of building a large list of followers, and in an elegant way that works exactly how a person or virtual assistant to do these tasks, but faster and better.

In fact, at this very moment, while writing this on my mac, my Windows PC is busy following 1,600 followers of a good “green”  list I found. Here some actual results from a Hummingbird user.

Hummingbird is not one of those “gray hat” friend gathering tools sold for other social networks. It does not violate the terms of service that currently exists with Twitter, nor does it get penalized for excessive API requests that happens with other software.

Note on Twitter API Calls: I’m not a programmer, but I think that because it interacts with twitter.com in a browser (much like a user), and does not use Twitter API calls, it is not subject to the limitations the API (too many requests, throttling, and etc.).

Automate Follow All

Within the Hummingbird browser, you will find targeted followers with the simple or advanced twitter search query and follow all the people in the query. Just as Twitter itself, it will present the number of followers a given twitter user has, and sort it by most to least.

With Hummingbird, by hitting the follow all button, it will go through the search results and follow all the users up to your Twitter daily follow limit (which is determined by several factors discussed on the Hummingbird forum).

Besides niche terms you might search for, you may have specific individuals or authorities you wish to find and follow their followers.

Depending on the content of your Twitter page and activity, a certain percentage of those you follow will follow back. I recently got a whopping 50% return follow rate, from a targeted and relevant list. The more relevant your targeted group and the more value you provide  on your own Twitter page, the more  followers you will get and keep.

Auto-Unfollow

When it reaches Twitters daily limit (a moving number) Hummingbird stops and gives you a chance to purge and “unfollow” those who do not follow you, all automatically, so you can continue to follow others. I recommend giving those you follow 2 days or so to follow you back or not and then use Hummingbird to auto-unfollow those who have not followed you back.

It even logs those you unfollow once and does not try to follow them again (potential red flag and just annoying to others)

Hummingbird also automates this task easily, purging your lists regularly. It also excludes from the auto-unfollow those added to a smart VIP lists so you can still follow the gurus like @michelfortin and @alexmandossian who may not follow you back (yet!)

Protect Users with Private Updates

If you are following someone with protected updates (their updates aren’t searchable, and don’t show up on the public timeline), you probably don’t want to unfollow them, as they had to “approve” your follow. With this feature enabled Hummingbird does not unfollow these people.

Support for Multiple Accounts

The latest release of Hummingbird supports multiple twitter accounts, with automated logins… making it even easier to use.

Kudos to Kevin and the team for a great time saving tool and for listing to users requests for additions and updates.

The Bottom Line

For any business or individual serious about their Twitter marketing strategy, you can either do it yourself, hire someone to help you do it, or purchase an application like Hummingbird. I find the first two options too time consuming, and I haven’t found another application that can do what Hummingbird is doing. There is one competitor who charges over $100 per month while Hummingbird is a $197 one time purchase.

When would NOW be a good time?

As it appears to be still early in the growth curve of Twitter and in time there may be greater restrictions on user accounts, now is the time to secure your name and brands as a Twitter URL and build your following quickly. You still have to do the work of providing value to your Twitter followers but Hummingbird automates the tedious parts that nobody wants to do and does so even better than any virtual assistant.

Watch this short video and then:

>> Get Hummingbird now

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