If you’re on a few Internet marketing mailing lists, you’ve no doubt received plenty of messages endorsing twittollower, a new twitter automation service. twittollower is not unique in what it does: Programs like Hummingbird, tweetadder and many, many more have been around for quite a long time already. But twittollower is unique in the way it’s being marketed and it’s at the same time amusing and fascinating.
Let’s have a look at what twitter automation does in general and what sets twittollower apart. Oh, and in case you’re already rolling your eyes because you can’t take another endorsement for this service: Don’t worry, this is definitely not an endorsement.
Twitter Automation in General
Okay, let’s have a quick look at the basics: For marketing purposes, what you want to achieve on twitter is to get as many people as possible following you, you want those people to be interested in what you tweet about (and more importantly, what you sell) and you want them to be responsive (i.e. tweet back when you ask a question and click on links when you tweet them).
The problem is that you can’t make people follow you on twitter. All you can do is send tweets and follow other people.
Sometimes, when you follow someone, they will follow you back. Not always, but following people and hoping for re-follows is basically the best shot you have at growing your follower count from within twitter.
Since there are certain limits to how many people you can follow and you probably don’t want to spend all day tending to your twitter account(s), this is where the automation comes in.
–
Hummingbird, tweet adder and twittollower
I have picked out two more twitter automation systems out of dozens, maybe hundreds that are available. The reason is simply that these two are, as far as I can tell, the most popular and best-established systems among the pack.
Hummingbird and tweet adder are very similar. Both are software programs that you download and run from your desktop. They connect to your twitter account (or multiple accounts) through the twitter API. Both of them let you search for people in your market in various ways (keyword search in member profiles, tweets etc.), you can set them to automatically follow a certain amount of people each day, according to certain criteria, you can tell them to un-follow people who are not following you back and to follow people who follow you, but you aren’t following yet.
You can also use them to schedule tweets and send automatic direct messages to people who follow you. Those aren’t all the features these two programs offer, but you get the idea.
Now, here’s the really interesting thing:
tweet adder costs $55 if you want to use it for just one account, $74 if you want to use if for five accounts and $188 if you want to use it with an unlimited amount of accounts.
Hummingbird costs $97 and lets you use unlimited accounts.
twittollower, on the other hand, costs $97 per month, for just one account.
And as far as I know, this was the introductory price and it’s about to increase.
–
twittollower = Magic
How can twittollower possibly survive against established competition that is available at a fraction of the cost? After all, even the most expensive option, the unlimited tweet adder service, costs less than twittollower by the third month you’re using it.
Surprisingly though, twittollower is doing quite well (at least, as far as I can tell).
The reason for this is simple and you’ll see it if you go and have a look at the sales-video. Now, the sales-video might change once they increase the price, but currently, it’s a pretty long video that you can’t navigate through (if you try, it always skips back to the beginning of the video) and it features Tahir Shah trying his best to use hypnotic suggestions and your typical “NLP-talk” throughout the video (yes, he’s definitely trying too hard).
It also doesn’t feature any explanations of what twittollower actually does.
The video goes to great lengths to tell you about how incredibly powerful twitter is and how it’s going to make you millions and how twittollower does everything on autopilot and how it will “get people to follow you” etc. But it never tells you what really goes on in the background. It doesn’t list any features.
And that’s where the magic lies.
With something like tweet adder, you clearly see that it’s a program and it requires user-input and then it goes and does certain things. In fact, it gives you a lot of control over the things it does, so it’s almost entirely transparent.
twittollower, on the other hand, just tells you that it will make your twitter following grow at an amazing rate and that you’ll make tons of money from those followers and that they should be charging $900 a month for it (they really do say that in the video).
In other words: A “common” twitter automation system is a useful tool, while twittollower will magically fulfil your dreams all by itself.
I think it’s clear to see which one of those options is more enticing.
For all we know, when you sign up with twittollower, someone creates a tweet adder or Hummingbird account for you and does the basic setup. We’ll never know and that’s why we’re willing to pay much, much more for twittollower than for those other tools.
–
What Else is New?
If you’ve seen a fair amount of IM product launches, this won’t be news to you. Practically every get-rich-quick system has a sales-pitch that is heavy on hopes and dreams and promises of money and very thin on factual information.
At the end of the day, this kind of promotion just gets more sales and allows for higher prices.
On the one hand, you can look at your own sales-processes and ask yourself if you’re applying this method as well. On the other hand, you can ask yourself if you want to be part of the dream-sellers or not.
As for twitter automation: It’s something I’ll probably take a stab at, sometime. You’ll get a nice round of reviews out of it, of course. For now, though, I have other priorities.
Have you tried any twitter automation system? What’s been your experience? Or what do you think of this whole twittering and dream-selling business in general? I’d love to hear your thoughts down in the comments!
Cheers,
Honestly Shane, I wouldn’t even use this type of program if it was free. I only follow people I want to follow and these are had picked. I use Tweetdeck and follow most that follow me, but only the ones I really like I make part of my close ‘Friend group’ that I closely follow. The rest are part of the general ‘all friend’ group and basically their tweetsgfo unfollowed.
I think it’s the same with most people. I had a look at some of the posts that people RT and some of them have thousands of followers, but I only get a tiny, tiny click through rate so I reckon most of their tweets are going unnoticed.
Yeah, as stated, I haven’t used anything like that myself, either.
I guess there’s “real” twittering (interacting with people you want to connect to) and “marketing” twittering (digging for traffic and revenue). The biggest issue I see with twitter is that many people follow thousands of others. Basically, they have to be ignoring 99.99% of the tweets in their stream, or they’d never get anything done. I’m quite skeptical of twitter’s use as a marketing tool, but then, I’ve never really tried, either.
I hated that video. It actually made me angry. Who does he think he is that he thinks he is entitled to steal 30 minutes of my life while I try to find out exactly what it is he is seelling, what it costs and why I would want it.
I tried to watch it a couple of times but just gave up part way through. Maybe it is a sales technique that works but it sucks.
A few of those each day and you have lost half of a day out of your life. I’ve got better things to do.
I’m shocked to have discovered the price here and I admire your persistance to watch the whole thing right through. I assumed it would be a $20 product. $97 every month is amazing. You could employ a real person to tweet for several hours a month for you for that money.
I am fed up with all the sales videos. If I can’t find out what it is in five minutes then I’m off. It should not take 30 minutes to persuade me to buy. If it’s good a five minute pitch should do the job.
You’re not alone with that, Tom. I see a lot of people complaining about these long, unskippable videos. It seems to me that those videos are clearly made for people who are new to Internet marketing. Since most of the videos follow the exact same pattern, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I think it’s very clear that this is something that turns seasoned marketers away, but newbies falling for it probably more than make up for that.
As for pricing, it really is phenomenal that anyone would sign up for that amount of money. Really makes me wonder. You could probably buy a program like Hummingbird and then offer a service for increasing people twitter followers for “only” $30 a month or so. All you’d have to do is plug your client’s account into the software and do some basic set up, then leave the software running. You pay once, they pay every month. If you sold it right, I’m sure this could be done.
It’s also a bit dissapointing to see that twittollower was yet another program that got promoted heavily by many marketers for one simple reson: high payouts. If it had been a service for a one-time fee of under $100, I bet most of them would never have mentioned it…
Hi Shane,
Interesting article and I just want to present the reverse side of the coin viewpoint. I’ve used Twittollower to build my twitter account, and it works a charm.
The video DOES actually tell you what it does and you’ve touched on it in the above post. It allows you automatically build a twitter following 100% hands free after a 30 second setup, targeting any niche of your choosing. It’s set and forget technology at its best, and it works.
That’s all it’s designed to do and that’s exactly what it does.
I actually had an opportunity to meet with Tahir at a recent seminar in the UK.
I asked him why the Twittollower video was so long purely out of interest, as I found it enjoyable and well presented, and as a marketer I wanted to know what his reasons were for creating such a long video.
He told me several reasons, both from an ethical standpoint and from a sales standpoint.
The first of those reasons was to stop people doing what they do with long sales letters… scrolling through the sales letter, and buying without a clue of what they’re buying.
Who reads the long winded sales pages fully?
People read the hyped up headlines, scroll down to the buy now buttons and purchase then regret they ever did.
Tahir doesn’t even let you get to the order page UNLESS you’ve made an informed decision based on what he tells you in the video and only gives you the link when he knows you are in a position to make an informed decision.
I’d call that pretty ethical, wouldn’t you?
Tahir sets out the case for twittollower and clearly states in the video that he will let the person decide if it makes a sound investment decision based on time, cost, and also sets out to show that twitter is a proven medium for making money.
Also, yes it’s not like the semi-automated tools that are out there like tweet-adder and hummingbird… and the price is higher, than those two products as you stated, which are NOT 100% automated tools. They need manual input each day. Twittollower doesn’t, in fact after your initial setup, you never need to log into the twittollower panel again if you don’t want to.
It continues working for you around the clock, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
So it’s unfair to compare apples with oranges – you can’t compare a fully automated tool, with semi-automated tools that require a daily time investment.
And Tahir compares it with a fully automated service – the featured user service and it’s cost on twittercounter dot com. The people who pay for that kind of fully automated twitter building service, ARE being charged $850+ per month for building 2000 followers, so in comparison… Twittollower is at a fraction of the price of what others are currently paying and would have to pay, and Tahir clearly explains that. That’s why he mentions the higher price point of what he should be charging for it, based on another fully automated way of generating the same number of twitter followers he guarantees in a month that twittercounter dot com charge.
From a sales point of view, Tahir has done a brilliant job, getting the benefits across, building a case for why he is charging a higher price than other semi-tools which he mentions are out there… and explains his reasonings clearly, leaving the person to make an informed decision.
In fact, I’m glad I had a 40 minute video explaining the benefits compared to semi-automated tools like tweet adder and hummingbird, and the massive cost savings compared to fully automated services like twittercounter dot com.
Hello Anthony,
Thank you for your comment! It’s great to see someone who reall reads a post and puts some thought into a comment. :)
Let me be clear: I don’t have anything against Tahir or his product. And it’s great to hear that twittollower has worked as advertised, for you.
However, I can’t help but be a bit cynical about the “ethical” aspect of the unstoppable sales-video… I particularly wonder why there’s a navigation bar, but you get “punished” for trying to use it by having the video skip back to the beginning. At least, that’s what it was like when I looked at the sales page. I don’t see what’s so ethical about that.
More importantly, what really struck me about the presentation was that there were many NLP/hypnosis cues in it, at many points. And this isn’t something I’m just making up or guessing. There are several “picture-book” hypnosis phrases in the video that could be taken straight out of a Richard Bandler or Milton Erickson book. Saying that you want to get all the information across before people make a buying decision and having a sales-message full of emotional button-pushing is one thing (that’s simply how marketing works), but basically attempting to hypnotise people into buying and calling that ethical? I’m not so sure about that.
I don’t know if it’s still the same video since the last time I saw it was sometime in Febuary.
The way I see it, the video is the way it is purely for marketing purposes. The goal is a high conversion rate. Period.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s marketing, after all. I just highly doubt that Tahir would reject using, say, a long-form sales letter if it was shown to convert significantly better, just for the “ethical” aspect of the unskippable video.
Again, I don’t have anything against the product or the marketer.