Yesterday saw the launch of the new program from Walter Bayliss called Totally Tweetable.
Let me start out by saying that I am a big fan of Walter’s sites. I use Instant Blog Subscribers every time I update my blog. It’s a great program. So I was very much looking forward to see what Walt’s latest project was going to be. I have to admit I was very disappointed to find out that it was a new Twitter marketing tool.
I like Twitter. I have Twitter setup as my homepage in my browser. I don’t tweet a whole lot but I am following some interesting people and I love reading my updates throughout the day. So when I started seeing automated messages sent by Totally Tweetable through the Twitter accounts of some of the people I was following I knew this was going to be a problem. I say “was following” because I have no interest in having my Twitter feed filled with advertisements. I have been unfollowing Totally Tweetable members since the site launched.
I was going to totally ignore Totally Tweetable until I started to see some glowing reviews from other marketers who’s opinions I respect. I figured I should join and take a look for myself to see if it’s as bad as it appears.
To be fair, Totally Tweetable starts out pretty good. It’s essentially a safelist/viral list builder. As a free member you can send an email (not a tweet) to 100 members every 7 days. You can earn additional credits to send your ads to more members by reading the emails sent by other members.
No problem there. I love safelists so that’s right up my alley.
The problem comes when you read your emails and claim your credits the program automatically sends a tweet from your Twitter account promoting the ad you just read. Yes, it’s good for the advertiser but it basically turns your Twitter into a spam account. If you read 20 emails a day to earn credits that means you are going to be sending 20 tweets a day promoting other people’s sites.
Why would anybody want to do this?
Want to know the fastest way to lose Twitter followers? Use Totally Tweetable.
It appears there are ways around this. You can create a fake Twitter account to use exclusively with Totally Tweetable. You can even skip the Twitter verification part to prevent the site from accessing your Twitter account. But what is the point of this? If your ads are being retweeted with Totally Tweetable you can bet that most of them are either going to garbage Twitter accounts or they are being sent along with dozens of other automated tweets pissing off that member’s followers.
I don’t know why Internet marketers have to try and turn everything they touch into a spam tool. Twitter is far too powerful to be abused like this. If you are a Twitter user you should be following people you want to follow and tweeting the things your followers want to read. Twitter is a “social” platform. It’s not for automated spamming!
To sum up… Totally Tweetable appears to be a good looking safelist/viral list builder that you can use to email your ads to other members. However if you link it to your Twitter account you might as well kiss all of your followers goodbye. If you choose to join make sure you setup a fake Twitter account or skip the step that gives Totally Tweetable access to your account.