I like to follow the people who are following me on Twitter. It helps nurture the relationship and makes it easier to have conversations. Unfortunately, a lot of bots were really spoiling everything. I saw someone using TrueTwit to validate followers, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’m pretty happy with it so far. It does have some downsides, but it certainly has helped cut down on the bot spam and I feel better about following people back again.
TrueTwit has both a free basic service and a paid premium service. The free service sends out a DM to anyone that follows you (you can control what it says) and asks them to follow a link to a page where they have to enter a captcha. You can then choose to automatically follow anyone that TrueTwit validates. TrueTwit offers some follower management through a list of followers – with when a DM validation message was sent and whether the profile validated. You can choose to unfollow or follow anyone right in the interfaces, which turns out to be a nice way to manage followers.
The Premium service, which costs $20 per year, doesn’t use DMs for validation, instead it runs a Follower Analysis on each profile to summarize the status of each. You also can choose whether to autofollow anyone that passes the analysis.
I’m not sure the Premium service is worth it for me, but I have been pretty happy with the decrease in spam since I started using the service. There is a downside in that number of DMs sent out – to anyone that follows you, which can quickly clog up your DM stream and make it hard to see actually DMs you’ve sent out. I imagine that some people also are annoyed that they have to go through another step to validate, but it’s not a requirement for following you. I actually go through my list of followers on TrueTwit’s interface to see if there are real people that I’d like to follow back, even if they didn’t validate. Some people also completely ignore DMs due to all the spam, so they’re unlikely to see the validation request. Filling out a captcha is also not a guarantee that the profile isn’t a bot. Programs have been getting better at filling them out, but it certainly helps.
TrueTwit is a nice service for improving the real conversations you have on Twitter with real people. It’s helped me cut down on the spam that’s sent to me and I’ve been fairly happy with the results. I don’t really foresee going to the Premium service unless I find that the validation really is annoying to people.
Have you used TrueTwit – either on your account or validating with another account? What do you think?
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Technorati tags: social media, marketing, TrueTwit, Twitter, social networking, business