Tweet Spinner Review: A Powerful Application to Manage Your Tweets

Finding productivity on Twitter, especially if you are a large company or one that manages several profiles for clients, can be quite difficult. It’s especially difficult to build up a strong following. Fortunately, Tweet Spinner is here to help. Tweet Spinner is a powerful application that manages the more high level management Twitter tasks for you, from managing followers/friends to changing your profile design and then some.

Tweet Spinner Feature Set

Tweet Spinner features four main features. We’ll get into these in detail in the next sections.

• Direct message management.  Consider spam protection for your email inbox ported over Twitter.  Sadly, this feature has become necessary, and TweetSpinner helps you maintain anti-spam rules to weed out the junk.
• Profile design rotator. Tweet Spinner actually lets you schedule different Twitter backgrounds, bios, and profiles, so that you can see which profile types might get the most engagement.  It also can be used to tell your followers more about you (and to encourage them to check your page more often!)
• Twitter CRM. Tweet Spinner is a CRM tool too, allowing you to connect with potential followers. You can find potential customers by location, view followers of your competitors and “mimic follow” them, analyze keywords you use that elicit the most response, and more. The tool will also prevent you from following spammer accounts through a variety of tactics.
• Scheduled Tweets and DMs. For a big company account, it’s difficult to actually engage all day long (and all week long, especially if you’re a 9-5 shop).  Therefore, you have the ability to schedule messages and to personalize them too.

Direct Message Management

When it comes to direct messages, TweetSpinner understands that you probably have been inundated with messaging that you’re not interested in. And while you could keep those messages stored on Twitter’s server, it might be in your best interest to have them stored to a separate account in the event that Twitter goes down or for ease of searching. With Tweet Spinner, you get a DM archive listed in an easy-to-read page that is searchable (via Ctrl+F on your keyboard; additional search facilities would be useful for accounts with thousands of DMs). You can choose to delete spam DMs or all DMs. Personally, I think something along the lines of an exportable data set would be excellent, but I’m a digital pack rat. 🙂

Spam management is offered within Tweet Spinner as well. In Tweet Spinner, spam management can only be applied to messages in your inbox, so if you’ve already archived your DMs, there is no need to run this as it will not find anything. You can choose whether to archive spam (do you really need to wade through those “is this really you?!” messages?) or not. You can also choose a very aggressive spam filtering method that will consider any DM with a URL as spam.

Both archival and spam filtering can be scheduled. This is a subscriber-only feature and occurs every four hours. You cannot change the schedule.

Follower Manager

One of the niftier features of Tweet Spinner is the follower manager. This is where you really can go golden in terms of finding targeted followers but ensuring that those you follow are relevant.

Filters

Right under the “Follower Manager” heading, you see some powerful filtering options that you are recommended to take advantage of. The first, “show/edit filters,” is broken down into four parts.  The “show/edit follower filters” lets you choose how you’re going to follow users on the service. This is further divided into two parts:

• General Follower Filter: You’ll be following users with Tweet Spinner, and based on other criteria, you can pause the rate that you follow users for a specified amount of time.  You can also set a specific follower-to-following ratio, and if you exceed this point, the system will stop following any additional users.  Further, you can limit the frequency of your following behavior; for instance, you may choose to follow 30 people at any specific time and then cool down for a bit so as not to be too aggressive.
• Specific Follower Filter: Let’s say you’re going to follow some users.  They need to meet specific criteria (of your choosing) before you go ahead and proceed, and this will apply to the various types of following options that Tweet Spinner offers (to be discussed).  These are:
  • The number of friends and followers they have.  If they have too many friends and not many followers, for example, you might not want to follow them.  You can set the follower-to-following ratio range in this section.
  • A specific number of friends. You can also follow users who have a specific number of friends (e.g. between 40 and 40000).
  • Age of account. You might not want to follow Twitter accounts that are 3 days old.  You might also want to see that they are future upstanding members of the community.  This is the section where that magic is made.
  • Tweet frequency. You might choose to only follow active users (who tweet between 1 and 100 times a month, for example) and not users who are either way too inactive or are too excessive.
  • Tweet activity.  You might want to follow users who have sent tweets recently.  Why follow someone who last tweeted in January of 2008?  You can set a day here.
  • User-filtering/pruning. If you’ve pruned them before, why would you follow them again?  You might not want to, and here’s a way to prevent the system from re-following someone you’ve unfollowed already.
  • Location. If you’re a local business, you’ll go crazy with the ability to follow Twitter users who are based on a geographic location. I believe that location filtering is based on the location listed in the bio, so someone entering their latitude and longitude will not be followed by this system.
  • Tweet content: URLs.  You might want to follow real people who are engaging.  If a high percentage of the user’s Tweets are filled with URLs, you might not have an interest.  You can specify the percentage threshold here.
  • Tweet content: @replies: You also might choose not to follow people if they are a broadcast tool.  If their tweets contain more than a user-specified percentage of replies, you might opt in.  After all, it shows that they’re involved in their Twitter stream.

With this filter, you must meet all the criteria before a person is followed.

The “show/edit purge & prune filters” removes spam bots and boring Twitter users.  You might do this based on the health of your Twitter account (good ratio of followers-to-following), or you can stop at a certain percentage threshold.  You can also specify to unfollow a maximum number of Twitter users per action (so as to avoid penalties from Twitter).  Finally, your most recently-added friends might be immunized in the sense that they won’t be affected by the pruning filter (though you might choose to wait a number of days before they do get the axe).

Your pruning filters also can apply to Twitter users who are inactive, if their tweets contain URLs, or if they tweet too excessively (default: 600 per month).

Tweet Spinner also has a “nofollow” user list that will algorithmically never follow users who meet certain criteria.  You might not want to follow specific users ever, and you can put their usernames into this box.  If their username contains fragments of a name you never want to see, you can also put them on the list (e.g. xxx means you’ll block xxxBob, YugoXXX25, and others).  Moreover, you can also nofollow people based on their tweets.  I might never want to follow someone who tweeted about “government grants,” and I can block out certain terms in this system.  At this point, the keyword fragment and keyword list is limited to 50.

Finally, there’s an immunity list (“show/edit immunity list”).  You might never want to unfollow your colleagues ever.  This is a way to keep them from being impacted by the purge.

Follower Manager Statistics

Now that we’ve gotten the filters out of the way (which is overwhelming but gives you solid control over your activities), you can dive into this amazing feature. You’re greeted with some general statistics about your follower-to-following ratio.   Based on this data, you might opt to prune followers. This is a sophisticated method that lets you unfollow spam and stale accounts.  In the future, you’ll be able to schedule pruning, but you can already schedule purging and following and the schedule runs every three hours.

You might want to unfollow everyone who is not following you.  The “purge” lets you remove up to 40 friends who are not reciprocally following you.   On the other side of the coin, you might choose to follow those who already follow you but who you haven’t reciprocated with.

Keyword Following

This is where the biggest and best features of Tweet Spinner shine. If people send specific tweets with phrases you’re interested in, you can automatically follow them.  You can also get statistics of whether these individuals reciprocated, and if so, what percentage of reciprocal following you’ve achieved.

Mimic Following

This is an altogether fascinating implementation of Tweet Spinner as well.  Let’s say I am a competitor of the guy behind the blue widget factory (@BlueWidgets) because I own red widgets.  I might want to see who he’s interacting with on Twitter and chooses to follow.  Or let’s say I’m doing promotion for the movie “New Moon” and might want to see who is following Peter Facinelli on Twitter since they probably would be interested in this Twitter account too.  This lets you do just that. Based on the targets you specified earlier, Mimic Following lets you follow the people you really could benefit from reaching out to.

Location Filtering

Again, for local businesses and brick and mortar locations, Location Filtering might be an incredible godsend.  Tweet Spinner uses case insensitive search but requires that you fill out detailed information for best results.  The example that they use is that for Portland, OR, you should enter “Portland, Oregon”, “Beaverton, Oregon”, “Oregon”, “PDX, Oregon”, and “Portland, OR” to catch all variations.

Profile Rotator

Here’s another great feature of Tweet Spinner. You can save your profile (bio, URL avatar, background color scheme, and background graphic) to the server and upload a custom one at will. You can even test to see if one performs better than another.

Here’s how it works: you can’t upload to the Tweet Spinner backend likely because they want to avoid incompatibility with Twitter (such as size limitations). The idea is to upload the files to Twitter first and then import it to the Tweet Spinner back-end. At any time, you can choose to upload the desired profile just by clicking a button on the Tweet Spinner interface. Statistics (# of times the profile has been uploaded) show up in this section.

You might choose to schedule your backgrounds to add some more flavor and personality to your account. What if, for example, Manny is working the day shift and wants to associate his profile with his Twitter corporate account when he’s on duty, but Nadia is doing the night shift and she, too, wants to have a profile that associates her information with the account when she’s up? That’s definitely possible with this functionality. When you schedule a profile rotation, the design is cycled and changes every few hours (as specified by you). It’s a great way to spruce up your account and keep it looking fresh.

Smart Tweets

Another great feature of Tweet Spinner is Smart Tweets. This is where you add and schedule tweets that will be cycled at a user-specified interval. This is different from HootSuite or other scheduled tweets in the sense that these are recurring tweets. If, for example, you want your followers to know that you have a special deal on a product, you can send a regular tweet every few hours to make sure it gets the most coverage.

Smart Tweets gets even more complex via Tweet Spinner’s “tweetscript” coding functionality. This lets you specify dynamic tweets to be sent. For example, you can create a list called “action” and put an unlimited number of phrases on the list.  If you tweet “don’t tweet and [action],” a different message (“don’t tweet and drive,” “don’t tweet and tweet,” “don’t tweet and drink,” “don’t tweet and eat,” as illustrated below) will be tweeted every time so as to avoid duplication. Tweetscript is a “language” that the Tweet Spinner team is enhancing on a regular basis, but there are already some pretty powerful ways to use it.

Rule-Based Direct Messages

Another pretty nifty feature of Tweet Spinner is the DM outbox. These are rule-based outgoing DMs that you can send via Tweet Spinner. Tweet Spinner only sends DMs if certain criteria in rules you specify are set. Once you have some rules in place, you can go ahead and personalize these DMs. Currently, the personalization supported is full name, friend count, follower count, number of days that the account has been in existence, number of days since their last tweet, the URL in their bio, and the location of the user. A possible implementation of this is “Thanks, [{fullname}], for following me. I see you’ve been on Twitter since [{created}]. Cool!”

Summary of Tweet Spinner

As you can see, Tweet Spinner is pretty complex and pretty exhaustive, but the features offered are pretty amazing. I personally get excited about the follower capabilities the most, but I really like how profiles can be rotated and messages can be varied and personalized. Tweet Spinner would make a good addition to an agency or big brand needing to have a little more control over Twitter. It’s especially useful to have an opportunity to let Tweet Spinner run its magic and find targeted followers; I haven’t seen a single Twitter application that offers any comparable features.

All in all, Tweet Spinner is fantastic. Their help documentation is lengthier than this article but everything is clearly explained. Once you’re set up, you have immediate access to these fabulous features, and you’ll have a chance to interact with your followers and leave the grunt work up to Tweet Spinner, from following new users (and not just any new user but those who would actually be interested in what you have to say) to changing up your profile colors every few hours.

If you’re a business looking to get a little more control over Twitter, check out Tweet Spinner. The first account is free (but limited in functionality), and you can add up to 5 other accounts for $18/month. Tweet Spinner also has agency pricing (10, 20, or 50 accounts) but takes Twitter TOS very seriously; to be considered for more advanced pricing, you need to contact them directly and let them know exactly which accounts you plan to use so that they can hand-check them and make sure that you do not intend to run spam accounts on Tweet Spinner.

I highly recommend Tweet Spinner. Even if you’re a small company, the keyword following options are superior, and it’s a lot of fun to actually get statistical data to see how well you’re doing.

Update: Genuine Chris explains how to get targeted followers using Tweet Spinner.

Disclosure: I was introduced to Tweet Spinner by business colleagues, and I took the initiative to request a full featured account for the purposes of this review. As Tweet Spinner runs an affiliate program, I am including affiliate links.