Are you wasting your days whale watching? No, I don't mean spending time on vacation. I mean that special brand of fun you can only have when Twitter is acting completely out of sorts like it has all afternoon today. Half the time a page load times out. A few times they've even put up the "Twitter is over capacity message" but haven't even served up a fail whale.

We're Used to It

As long time Twitter users we're used to it. Is there any other web business where users would put up with such a high rate of failure? Slow response times and sporadic failures are a weekly occurence with Twitter. When Google went down for an hour it made huge news, but people shrug off Twitter going down like a piece of moldy bread. The beauty of it, from Twitter's standpoint, is that when they're having trouble, their user's can't even tweet about it! And when they come back people make a collective sigh of relief and go right back to Twittering.

It's a Problem if You're in Business

The problem with whale watching is that if you're depending upon Twitter to promote your business these outages cost you time. If you're following a manual methodology for adding followers you're going to eat up a lot of time. If you're trying to add twitter followers, the key is to keep up a steady amount of activity, every day.

Let's say you've become completely motivated and want to add a lot of Twitter Followers so you can have an effective marketing impact. You decide that every day you're going to spend a few hours following people on Twitter. Unfortunately, when the Fail Whale surfaces it's easy just to quit that activity and move on to something else. The chances are you'll forget to come back to your Twitter Following task. The next day you do a little less, and within a few weeks you've completely stopped. In another month you decide "Gee, I really ought to get back to that."

The problem with your manual method is that your competitors might not be doing it. Instead of spending an hour a today for a month following people on Twitter, they might have spent $39.95 for a month of the PMS Social Suite and had the autopilot run for several hours a day against an advanced database of people targeted within their niche and likely to follow them back. Perhaps you're proud of your 2,500 followers. They're adding that many followers every week.

What you're really saying by insisting upon spending an hour a day on something you could automate is that your time is only worth $1.33/hour. If that is all your time is truly worth, then perhaps this internet marketing thing isn't your cup of tea...

When the fail whale beaches itself a server based automation system will slog through. If you've installed software on your own machine to do the same thing, your environment slows down with Twitter. A server based solution that you can just set on autopilot and forget about it makes the most sense.

I'm Afraid My Account Will Get Banned

That's a reasonable fear. Which is why you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. You shouldn't have a single account, you should have a stable of accounts, targeted at the various niches you're going after. If you've invested a lot of time and money building a single account, don't automate it. Create another account and use the automation to build it's followers. When you tweet, use the new account to retweet what you just said.

We have not had a customer get an account banned as a result of using our software. But obviously we can't guarantee that it won't happen. Twitter doesn't seem to mind the kinds of things our software does. Our customers have added 330,142 followers in that last two weeks. That's a lot of activity. Twitter has every motive to have as much activity among their user base as possible. They need to overcome the Oprah drop off effect (A lot of people signed up after Oprah talked about Twitter, and a month later their accounts went dormant). But that could change and Twitter could go to war against the power users much like Digg did. So don't put your eggs all in one basket. Get a lot of eggs, and a lot of baskets.

The pros in this business are all using automation. If you're shying away from automation because you're afraid of losing your account with 500 hard earned followers, you're getting your lunch eaten by the competition and you don't even know about it. They're getting more clicks than you have followers. You can't compete with that without automation.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account. Just register and click on the PMS Social Suite link. You know you want to.

How would you like to add several hundred twitter followers every day, forever? Without adding any additional work to your day? Without installing any software? Just put it on autopilot and walk away?

If that's an interesting proposition, you should read through this entire article.

New Twitter Limits

A while back, Twitter published some limits on following people on Twitter. The key numbers from this are:

• 1,000 per day - That's the limit for the number of people anyone can follow in a day. It doesn't matter if you're Ashton or just Joe Marketer, 1,000 is the limit. That applies to the services that follow people back for you as well.
• 2,000 people to start - You can follow up to 1,000 people per day until you hit 2,000 people. Twitter doesn't publish the next number, but we can verify that it's 10%. You can follow 10% more people than are following you after you've followed 2,000 people.

A Different Approach to Fighting Spammers

While Twitter does indeed go after spammers, they aren't as heavy handed as Digg. They don't seem to ban on a whim. Instead, they let the natural limits of the system determine what people can do. This is more effective than Digg's strategy, which seems to have been to make their system as unusable as possible for marketers. Twitter seems to realize that marketers are a key component of their ecosystem and have helped them grow.

Internet Marketers are like the helpful bacteria in your digestive system. You'd think they'd be bad for you, but if you eradicate them you'll end up sick. Social networks that take a heavy handed approach towards discouraging marketers are doing the same thing.

If you're a long time Promote My Suite Social Suite User, you'll notice some big changes that just went into effect. For one thing, we've dropped all the Digg support. They just didn't seem to be interested, and it wasn't worth fighting the constant battles to get a share of a declining market. Twitter is clearly outpacing Digg these days, so we thought it made more sense to put our efforts into a platform that was actually friendly to internet marketers.

What do the Limits Mean to You?

The new following limits aren't that big a deal to internet marketers (honest ones, at least). 1,000 people a day is a lot of follows. That's 30,000 people you could follow in a month if you were willing to put the time in. If you could get 80% of them to follow you back you'd be adding 24,000 followers a month. It wouldn't take you very long to be a real player.

The problem is most internet marketers don't work like that. They're chronically short on attention. They'll try something for a couple of days or maybe even a week, and then move on to the next shiny thing that pops up. It takes an overwhelming amount of discipline to pound your keyboard through 1,000 profiles every day, cull out the ones that aren't following you after a few days, and keep that up over the long term.

Put it on Autopilot

That's why the new PMS Social Suite is so hot! You can build your twitter following without any of that drudgery. Instead, you log into the system once, enter your twitter account information, and you're done. Our servers will take care of the rest. You can just wait for the status emails to tell you how you're doing or visit the site periodically and look at some pretty graphs.

And more importantly, you can spend your time interacting with people and doing real marketing instead of trying to make tools work and clicking lots of buttons.

Check it out: PMS Social Suite. There's a free version for registered users too!