We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"

A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.

There's an easy solution to this: just go to your Dashboard, click Edit, then click Delete. The next day you'll get an automated message reminding you that you need to enter data if you want the service to work, and then you'll be done. Any record we have of your Twitter information will be gone and you won't end up in the next processing batch.

You Might Not Be Thinking About This Right

We've said several times that you shouldn't use this service for your primary, personal account. Aside from the danger that you could get banned (a small risk, but it can happen and you've been warned), it also means that your personal timeline will see a huge influx of followers. If you don't want to see that, then just create a separate business account and run that through the system. Don't mix business and pleasure.

It also comes down to diversifying your social portfolio. Do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket? If you're targeting five different niches, then you should have five different Twitter accounts -- at least!

Twitter automation is really hot right now. The strategy is working quite well. Will it work forever? Probably not. The only thing constant in Internet Marketing is change. You're not paying any money to Twitter, which means they can do pretty much whatever they want and you don't have recourse. Let's say things change dramatically in six months. If you've been following a particular strategy on a single account and that account becomes worthless, you've lost everything. But if you've got several accounts with different strategies, it's like riding out a downturn in the market with a diversified portfolio. It just doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to put all your bets on a single account.

How to Keep Track of it All

There are lots of ways to deal with a flood of data in your twitter stream. If you're using the Twitter html interface, you're in a horse and buggy while being passed in the autobahn. It's quaint, but ultimately dangerous.

Our personal preference for a client is Tweetdeck. There are others, that's just the first one we came across that really worked well. If you've got a huge number of people you're following but are only interested in a few key areas, just create a real time search on those keywords. Tweetdeck will display tweets in a separate column that match that search. Now you're right on top of things in real time. You can have a huge net and personal interaction with the key prospects you're looking for.

Let's say there is a small group of people that you really want to follow. You can create a group and display just tweets from that group in a column.

Your RSS reader is also a great way to keep track of tweets in near real time. Look at a Twitter profile page. Down at the bottom of the right sidebar you'll see an rss feed for that user, such as Lt_Draper's RSS feed. You can load that into your rss reader and you'll see the tweets from that user arrive.

Or perhaps you'd like to follow a group of people with RSS. Just create a Yahoo Pipe like Don and Oliver's RSS Feeds. That pipe shows how simple it is to create a mashup of multiple RSS feeds. Click "Edit Source" and you can see how easy it was to build.

You Can Still Be Personal and Popular

There seems to be the misconception among many Internet Marketers that you have to make a choice between having a lot of followers and having quality followers. There's a group of people that think hand picked, delicately crafted follower lists have higher quality than huge lists gained through automation.

Anybody would agree that specifically targeted leads are better than shotgun leads in their eventual quality. But there doesn't have to be a choice between the strategies. Why can't you use automation to build up a large following while you're using manual methods to specifically target people? Automating just means that you have more time for higher value activities. I'll take a list of 30,000 followers, about 1,000 of which were carefully targeted, over a list of 1,000 carefully targeted followers any day.

The benefit to that approach is social proof. If you've got a larger following, the people you follow will see you as more credible than the guy with 60 followers. If you're concerned that people will be put off by your huge following, then run an account that is only handcrafted leads and a few others that are automated.

Find out for yourself. Experiment, measure, and repeat until you find what works. Just don't let the preconceptions you've formed without experience or data color what your'e seeing.

Oh yeah, there's a free trial available: PMS Social Suite. You didn't really expect me to forget to plug what we're selling?