Recently, I spent a few days experimenting with a Twitter automation service, TweetLater. If you’ve ever followed someone on Twitter and then immediately had them follow you back or gotten a message that said something like “Thanks for following me, check out my web site at ….”, chances are you’ve been on the receiving end of an automated tweet. (Although, people can and do send these sorts of messages manually.)

Some people are truly offended by these sorts of automated tweets, and some will even unfollow you if you use them. I have received them, and continue to receive them sometimes when I follow new people, and they don’t bother me. My goal with TweetLater was to see what impact it would have on the people following me and whether it would drive more traffic to this blog. Here’s what I found, after using it over a period of three days.

Effect on followers
Using TweetLater, I sent automatic welcome messages to almost 50 new followers over the course of about three days. Three people expressed some sort of discernible unhappiness with those messages, as far as I could tell. Usually that took the form of a reply, a direct message back to me or a tweet expressing their dislike with automatic welcome messages. One or two people unfollowed me. To their credit, when I engaged a couple of these people, they were willing to have a conversation about their decisions. I didn’t try to change any minds, I just wanted to know what was motivating them. Did they dislike the fact that it was an automatic tweet, without human involvement, and thus impersonal? Did they dislike the fact that my welcome message asked them to visit my blog? In general, they disliked both. This small group of people viewed automated tweets as a form of spam.

So there was some negative feedback, though it involved a relatively small percentage of the people who got automated messages from me.

Effect on traffic to blog
Did the automated tweets drive new traffic to my blog? Well, yes, but not as much as I would have expected. And it had no discernible affect on the number of subscribers to MarkTzk.com. According to my Google Analytics numbers, I got just four visits from Twitter during the period of my little experiment. That’s one-third the level of traffic I got from organic search via Google over those three days (yes, I know, my traffic numbers are very small; I am not an A-lister). There were a few direct visits during that time, some of which may be attributable to Twitter, as people may have seen my tweet on their mobile device or through a desktop Twitter app and come via that route, and Google may not have recorded the precise source of traffic. But even counting those visits, most of my automated direct messages did not seem to generate new visits to my site.

Arguably, in the “negative reaction vs. increased traffic” trade-off, I got more new traffic from this practice. But it was a very small margin, and I tend to think it’s probably not worth even the very limited negative reaction automated tweets can create. I should also note that several people responded to my automated tweets with positive thank you messages, and a few opened up short dialogues with me that were, very positive. So not everybody views automated tweets as spam.

My takeaways
I do think services like TweetLater can be useful, but I think you’ve got to be pretty clear first why you’re on Twitter and what your goals are with your Twitter account. If you mean your tweets to represent you as a person and you want to build meaningful relationships, then automated tweets are probably not a good choice. If, on the other hand, you just want to automate your Twitter activity or drive traffic to a site, then this may be a good thing to do. If you choose that, though, you’ll have to accept that some people will respond very negatively, and often publicly, to your practice. (I’ll have another post about etiquette on Twitter and other social media sites in the future.)

To be really effective in driving traffic to your blog, I think you would have to spend some time experimenting with what exactly your auto-welcome message says and optimizing that. You would also have to optimize whatever landing page you send new followers to.

Some people send auto-welcome messages that don’t contain links. These thank people for following and may have a friendly message such as “I look forward to getting a chance to network with you. Please let me know if I can help you in any way.” Though that’s less pushy than sending a link, I’m not sure it really accomplishes much if there’s no human being behind it to start a dialogue.

The bottom line: If you use an automated Twitter service of some kind, be very clear about your goals with it and be prepared for at least some negative reaction.

(p.s. If you’re interested, I’m @marktzk on Twitter.)