Last week AlertRank added automatic posting of Google Alerts to Twitter. To test this feature before releasing it, we used a Twitter account that doesn’t have any followers, and sent automatic tweets based on high-ranking Google Alerts for a 24 hour period. Our auto-tweet feature allows you to add any text to the end of each automatic tweet, which makes it easy to add hashtags. I didn’t want our testing tweets to bother anyone, so I used a hashtag of #test. The test worked, and we ended up releasing the new feature. But the funny part was that 43 people followed this test account in 24 hours. It looked like we had stumbled on a way of adding followers without having to do any work.
This seemed too good to be true, so to test it again, I created an account called @marketing_alert. I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was a bot. The account has no photo, no followers, and the bio says that it is based on auto-tweets. I used the hashtag of #marketing, and sent it high-ranked alerts based in Google Alerts for search terms like marketing, social media marketing, and conversational marketing. I set the tweeting rate to 5 an hour. A week later this account had 159 followers.
This practice of sending Google Alerts to a Twitter account raises a lot of questions:
- Is this spam? I don’t think so, since the alerts are legitimate stories, and they point to pages that we don’t benefit from.
- Is this deceptive? No, since the bio clearly says that this is an automatic stream of alerts.
- Is this of any value? It could be very valuable if you want to reach a targeted Twitter audience based on keywords.
- Why would you have such an account? Well, once you have a large number of followers in a targeted Twitter account, you could add any additional messages you want by hand, such as pitches for your products or links to blog posts.
Of course, you don’t have to auto-tweet to a separate account. It seems like a great way of adding useful content to your own twitter account. As long as you choose high quality alerts, and hashtags that truly match the content, it seems like a legitimate way of sharing useful information, and gaining followers at the same time.
Right now you can perform this automatic posting of alerts with the Pro account on AlertRank, but we are about to start beta testing a free version of this specific feature called AlertTweet. If you are interested in being a beta tester, let me know at: adam at alertrank dot com.
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