Saturday, November 6, 2010

Automating Direct Welcome Messages For Twitter Accounts

Shortly after creating my Twitter Account, I found and began following other Twitterers who seemed to have mastered the ability to have more time in the day for sending Direct Messages to me thanking me for following them and promising something fabulous and life-changing for my efforts. With a little digging, however, I found these Twitterpreneurs had found one of the many free online services for automating responses. So no altering of the space-time thingy in this document. Sorry. What we will discuss, is how to leverage this very simple, yet, if done right, powerful tool in your tweeting arsenal.


Let's begin by defining what a Direct Message is to Twitter. In the “new” Twitter (#NewTwitter), they are called only “messages”, and are private twitter messages, Tweets, sent to someone following you. Messages can not be sent to users not following you. From the Twitter Support Site;

“Direct messages behave more like tweets than emails: any action the sender of a DM takes on a direct message will affect the recipient of that DM. As the recipient of the Direct Message, you have the ability to delete it; the messages you delete also disappear from the sender's sent tab. Conversely, deleting direct messages you have sent will also delete the message from the recipient's inbox forever.”

If you've followed anyone lately, you've probably also received one of these messages thanking you for the follow, and now we're going to show you, our at home viewing audience, exactly how to automate these messages for your Twitter Account. You will have to choose one of the many Social Management Webware Sites, I'm using SocialOomph.com and am showing the process using that site.

Point your browser at http://ping.fm/7jeiP and click on “Register” on the top right of the page or in the left navigational link.

Your page will load to register a new account:

Complete the information and select “Create Free Account” button at the bottom of the page. Once you've done this the site will try to have you register for their newsletter, your choice, sign up or ignore. Either way, when you are ready to begin, simply go to the “Login” link and Log in to the site with the credentials you just set (Username and Password).

After you login in, you will be directed to the “Main Landing Page”. As you can see there are many things that SocialOomph can be used for, right now we are going to continue to focus only on Twitter message automation. Select the link to “Add a New Twitter Account”. If you are logged into Twitter in a different browser tab, you will be prompted to connect the account, if you are no already logged into Twitter, you will be prompted to provide your Username and Password for that account. Once you have provided the information and selected the “Allow” button, (this is your choice as we do not validate the levels of security used on socialoomph.com) the sites will be linked and you can begin setting up the messages.

Twitter will then redirect you back to socialOomph and you will be prompted to edit/automate the account. Since we are talking about automating welcome messages, select the “Auto Welcome:” check box and then type in the message you want to welcome your new follower with. One of the very interesting features of this webware is the ability to rotate or “spin” through a number of unique messages for subsequent followers. To create these spinnable welcome messages, use the “{” key, type in up to 140 characters and then use the “|” key between the last character in the first message and the first character in the next. Repeat this middle step as many times as you'd like and then finish with a “}”.

Next decide if you want to “Auto Follow” your new followers, and if you want to “Vet Followers”. Auto Follow just means you return the following favor and automatically follow their tweets. This is good twitter manners especially if you are trying to build a substantial following. Vetting is whenever someone follows me, I have 72 hours to login to SocialOomph and decide whether to approve (i.e., follow) the new follower, ignore them, block them, etc. This prevents me from following spammers, or people who have not been on Twitter long enough for me to be able to evaluate whether they are worth following.

After you have set up the automation, you can check back to the Automation and Statistics page by choosing the “View My Automation Status & Statistics” link under the Social Accounts section of the Main Landing page. During the writing of this document, we had a new follower, and, because we setup the automation to directly message them a “Thanks for Following” greeting, they were welcomed by a personal tweet.

This personal tweet was one we had just constructed using the spinnable messages process, and may or may not be the best message for me to convey to my Twitterspace. I, like you, will have to continue to test, refine, rewrite, test, jusdge, refine, rewrite... well, you get the picture!


~cds
netnet

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home