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When starting up a client Twitter presence, I start with a seed list of active wine bloggers and enthusiasts. The process is pretty simple, basically logging into the new account and then visiting my Twitter friends page on my company Twitter account and mindlessly click on the follow button. Brute force but it works.

These days there are hundreds of wine enthusiasts on Twitter and this process takes a lot more time than I’d like so I’ve been looking at ways to automate this process. Sure there are applications out there that auto follow based upon keywords but this is not as precise as I’d like it to be and slightly spammy.

A couple months ago, Josh over at Pinotblogger posted a method to use the list of wine Twitter users to automatically follow the entire list. Being someone with pretty decent technical chops, I tried his process but couldn’t make it work. I abandoned this and started to look around for a way to clone one of my existing accounts and then move it over to a second account. This is when I found Friend or Follow and Tweetake, both applications that allow you to backup your Twitter activities in a text file. From there it was an easy search to find Twitterator which loads a plain text file of Twitter users and automatically follows them.

So I put these together and came up with the following process to grow your Twitter followers without much manual effort:

1. Copy the list of wine Twitter people here. Paste this list into a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit. Make sure you have a plain text file (for example, the default in TextEdit is RTF but can easily be converted into plain text under the “Format” menu).
2. Change your Twitter password. It doesn’t have to be a very secure one as it will be just used for a few minutes.
3. Go to Twitterator, enter your Twitter credentials and paste the list of wine Twitter people from step 1 into the big box. Click submit.  Now sit back and wait for the script to run and in a few minutes you will be following hundreds more people on Twitter. I’ve found that there have been errors of some sort each time I’ve done this but it still seems to work pretty well. Once the script is complete, go back and change your Twitter password back as you’ve just sent it out in the open, a security risk. I haven’t had any problems with someone taking my account over but it is good practice to be safe here since Twitterator does not use any secure authentication.
4. This is sort of extra credit but I thought I would throw this one in. After a few days most of the follow-backs will happen. If you have an existing account with several hundred (or over 2,000 in one of my accounts) you will no doubt miss follow-backs on your end. I’ve found that using the Twitter web interface to be tedious so Friend or Follow helps with this, as well. I like this over similar sites like Tweetake and Tweeptracker as you don’t have to login to get your results. Just enter your username into Friend or Follow and wait for it to grind through your account. At the end you will have three tabs that have people you follow but don’t follow you back, “fans” who follow you but you don’t follow back and “friends” who you follow and also follow you. On each tab there is a “CSV” link to download this data. For me, the most useful tab is “fans” which I download, open in Excel and sort by number of followers. Then I just look at the descriptions to determine if I should follow these people back or not. Even though I keep pretty good tabs on follow backs, I found about 20 I missed doing this on my Acan Media account. Just cut and paste the account names into your text editor and then revisit Twitterator (don’t forget to change your password temporarily).

Can’t Friend or Follow be used for spamming? Well, yes, it can but I think there are a couple things here that might prevent this. The first is Twitter’s limit of following 2,000 people. Once you reach that level you can not follow anyone else until you get enough follow backs. The second reason is Friend or Follow chokes on large accounts so as tempting as it is to download Gary Vayerchuk’s Twitter followers, it just doesn’t work.

Now that you have followed people interested in wine, concentrate on creating great content. These can be links, events, blog posts, re-tweets or joining the ongoing conversation. Just don’t promote your winery too much to prevent people from un-following you.

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