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.