Small business should not automate twitter
To Automate, or not to automate? This is the question that many twitter newcomers wonder. Is it worth auto-following hordes of people you don’t know, only to end up with a twitter account so clogged up you can not read it?
If you are a small business owner, the answer is a clear NO!
Why not automate it, shouldn’t everyone aspire to 10,000 followers?
Auto-following people on twitter can be very useful if you are going to publish a new book, sell a new product, or reach the masses as a corporation. If your goal on twitter is simply to do branding, by all means automate away! I personally ran a test using twitter and automation to follow several thousand people in a matter of days and as a result my new blog had 500 hits on its first day with no other marketing than a couple of tweets. When you think about the impact that could make over a year, or two.. thats great branding for free!
However, if you are a small business owner and you are trying to reach new potential clients and contacts, you should steer clear of the automation fad. Twitter is a great tool for building new relationships, meeting new people, and getting a glimpse into the lives of people that you would otherwise never know. That said, this is impossible if you are friends with ten thousand strangers! The other side of the coin is that you could actually do damage to your brand through a negative emotional response to your automation.
In the world of internet marketing is has been shown that people can actually gain a negative opinion of a brand by its invasive advertisements. In plain english that means people might think badly of you for inviting your brand into their lives, without inviting yourself along with it.
People are adaptable, and they learn to spot advertising very quickly. Think about how many people have followed you on twitter and when you visit their profile you see they follow 2,534 people. At the same time you see they only have 1,234 followers. This is a tell tale sign that they have no interest in yout tweets, they are just scraping twitter for followers.
Scraping doesn’t even sound nice, and when you do it to someone, they don’t think highly of you for it.
Twitter can be a world class education, and relationship building tool when it is used as such. If you are trying to meet new people to grow your business, stay away from twitter automation and try human interaction instead. Respond to the follower on your own with something personal. Retweet something someone said that you liked on occasion. Reply to someones tweet and start a conversation. Get involved in using hashtags to enter the larger community discussion.
Its a social networking tool.. be social.. not robotic!
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Aaron Mills is a Project Manager for Jailbreak Creative. He has many years of experience working in the web industry and regularly works with local and national clients on a variety of web projects.
Aaron has extensive experience working in both PHP and Ruby on Rails Projects. Aaron also does work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and web marketing. 
I disagree, at least in part. Automating your presence on Twitter can be done properly, but it needs to be done sparely. Certainly automatic following is poor form, but automatically cross-posting your new blog posts or other items from your blog to your Twitter stream (or Facebook, for that matter), is simply good business. No sense in not automating what you would otherwise be doing manually.
Where problems come in is when people automate their entire Twitter presence. That’s bad. Cross-posting items is great, but you need to be there to join in on the conversation, respond to DMs, and so forth.
I agree with your points, and may be I was not clear in my point. By automation, I mean a non-human run twitter account that interacts with other people on its own. This would be a twitter profile that auto-responded to people when they follow you, or something that created spam like messages.
I do think automation can have its place, and in general its with tools that help you identify important people to follow. These tools can be of great value because they can see a better view of the twitterverse than the regular person. Another tool that can be used sparingly is tools that auto-follow people based on the words they type into twitter. This can be a two edged sword, but I have made good use of tools like this without spamming.
The other area that can be automated is a link between facebook and twitter, and a blog and twitter because they make life easier. Also tools that let you post tweets when you know you will be unavailable, or will forget to tweet something.
The wrong approach that many people take is to create a faceless profile with a business name and then let it run on autopilot. This is the spam we all hate so much!
Thanks for your thoughtful comment!
Aaron