Twitter Automation Guide

What you should and shouldn't automate on Twitter [Updated 2023]

Owlead Profile Picture

by owlead

Oftentimes we fall into the trap of trying to automate everything in our life. And Twitter automation isn’t an exception.

From the washing machine to your social media presence, we think that all should be working on autopilot while we take care of our daily routine.

But, you know what? Not everything should be automated.

In the following post, we’ll go through what you are able to automate, what you should, and what you shouldn’t automate on Twitter to have a healthy and profitable Twitter account.

We’ll be analyzing the pros and cons of Twitter automation: automate following on Twitter, unfollowing, likes, retweets, DMs, content creation, and content scheduling.

Also, I’ll point you in the right direction on which tools we suggest to use in each case.

Without further ado, let’s dive right into our Twitter Automation Guide.

Index Twitter Automation Guide

Before continue: Meet the Best Tool to Increase your Twitter Followers.

Start 15 Day Free Trial

Our very own Twitter growth service that helps you gain real, targeted and organic Twitter followers on autopilot. Increase engagement. Meet the most affordable way to increase your twitter followers. Less than 1 minute to set up.

Start Your Free Trial

Why use Twitter Automation?

Being on top of your social media platforms, having a work-life balance, and taking care of yourself leaves little space for almost anything else in your routine.

So, doing tasks repeatedly that aren’t adding value to your life makes no sense.

But, you don’t have to run right out and automate everything.

If you do, you would soon realize that craftsmanship is still important.

Now, you should carefully analyze your processes to determine what should be automated (not-value added tasks) and what you shouldn’t (valued-added tasks).

So, you may be wondering: how do I detect tasks to be automated on Twitter?

Stay with me and I’ll guide you while we learn what to automate on Twitter.

 

How to automate on Twitter (the right way)

So, here at Owlead we have an axiom regarding automation and it’s the following:

"Master, then automate"

That simple statement is the recipe for success when automating any task.

Sounds pretty obvious, don’t you think? But, it’s hard to follow.

Day after day we receive signups from accounts that are starting on Twitter looking for our Twitter automation bot, but they haven’t followed even a single account on their own.

Basically, they haven’t hit the dust with the task they want to automate.

And that is the recipe for failure.

When doing things manually, you are able to identify the pros, cons, and learn about the process that you want to automate.

How do you expect to automate content creation if you haven’t created a single tweet?

And, how do you know what content will impact and engage your audience?

Or, how do you expect to automate content scheduling if you haven’t created several tweets at different times of the day?

…you get the point.

Remember this simple phrase, and you’ll be good to go with Twitter automation: Master, then automate.

What can you automate on Twitter?

To begin, let’s identify the main actions you have on Twitter:

  • Twitter Promotion
    • Automate Twitter Following
    • Automate Twitter Unfollowing
  • Twitter Interaction
    • Automate Twitter Likes/Retweets
    • Automate Direct Messages (DMs) on Twitter
  • Content Creation
    • Automate Tweets
    • Automate Retweets of your content
    • Automate Content Scheduling

Automate Twitter Following

We can call this the first growth hacking technique coined on Twitter to promote accounts.

And, you should be surprised that Twitter auto-follow is still a thing in 2023.

It’s true that Twitter has limited the follow/unfollow actions, but you can still gain a decent amount of followers daily by targeting follows and unfollow accordingly.

Following other accounts to bring attention back to your account is not just a working strategy, it is still the most affordable way to gain real and targeted followers.

Remember, to automate you first have to manually dominate.

Once you know where your target audience is, how they respond to your follows, and how you keep a balanced following/friends ratio, you can take this strategy to the next level by using a Twitter Auto Follower.

👍  Suggested Twitter Auto Follow tool:

There are competitors out there for you to take into consideration, learn why you should pick Owlead instead of our main competitors.

Automate Twitter Unfollowing

If you are automating your following on Twitter, you’ll have to take care of your following/followers ratio to make the most out of your brand and build trust around your Twitter profile.

To manage your Unfollowing you can take three different strategies:

  • Unfollow all
  • Unfollow the non-followers
  • Using your Following as a cross-promotion space

Unfollow all your followers

If you want to keep your timeline clean of noise, you can go ahead and unfollow all the accounts previously followed.

This will keep your following/followers super healthy, you’ll end up following just the accounts you are interested in and are adding value to your timeline.

In doing this, be sure to prevent leaving your following on 0, we’ve found that Twitter sees this as a negative use of the platform and could temporarily restrict your account.

Unfollow the non-followers

The second strategy is a follower’s friendly one.

You can unfollow all the accounts that aren’t returning the follow-back for your account and keep the follow of just those that are following you.

If your account has a good Twitter follow-back ratio, this strategy could hurt your following/followers ratio in the long run since you’ll be following lots of accounts that are already following you.

Following as a cross-promotion space

Last but not least, a non-traditional way to do cross-promotion on Twitter is by using your Following to redirect the viewers of your profile to other projects you may want to drive the attention of.

How does this work? Simple. When someone is viewing your profile it will detect that you have a low Following base (ideally under 10).

This will catch the attention and will lead to more visits to the rest of your profiles.

👍  Suggested Twitter Auto Unfollow Tools:

 

Automate Twitter Likes/Retweets

Automating Twitter likes is another of the most popular ways to hack your way to growing your Twitter account, but from our point of view, no longer reliable for many reasons.

Currently, the likes work like a social proof validator.

Not only my account is giving the like and boosting the attention of the tweet, but also this tweet could be a tweet highlighted in the timeline of my followers.

So, you have to take care of the likes you are giving.

You don’t want your account to be associated with tweets that don’t represent your values or point of view.

While automating likes (hearts), you have to take into consideration all of the following to not mess up and give a like to an unwanted tweet:

  • Sentiment analysis of the tweet: is it a positive or negative tweet?
  • Context of the tweet: is it related to my industry or the creator is writing about another industry?
  • Is the creator trustworthy or this tweet is just a good tweet in an inappropriate account?
  • Is this a joke, meme, or sarcastic comment?
  • And so on…

Too many variables to take into account and to trust a third-party tool to automate.

The issues we see around automating likes are the same as automating retweets from other accounts since the action is the same: giving social validation to third-party content.

❌  As a wrap-up, we don’t recommend automating Twitter likes/retweets with third-party accounts.

Automate Direct Messages (DM) on Twitter

This is a tactic that a lot of accounts use trying to deliver their content or make sales.

But, the truth is, you can’t expect that someone that has just started following you, will buy your service/product right away.

It’s just naive.

A set of interactions, familiarization, and trust must be delivered before someone purchases your product/service.

So, delivering an automated direct message because someone has just followed you, isn’t a smart move.

Check this bad example and how all these accounts are using the same template almost without changing a single letter:

Twitter Automation: don't automate DMs

❌  As a wrap-up, we don’t recommend automating DM’s on Twitter.

 

Automate Tweets

At the time we are creating this post there’s hype over artificial intelligence and content creation, specifically using GPT-3.

We were able to find a couple of interesting experiments like this one that will automatically create tweets around a word based on artificial intelligence.

But, after playing around, you’ll notice that things are still in diapers regarding content creation with added value and AI.

When writing content on Twitter and having business around your account, you have to scratch emotions that aren’t on the surface. That can’t be delegated so easily and effectively.

Also, you have to have a clear and concise strategy to know when to knock on the door of your audience asking for interaction or selling a product/service. No easy task.

What about creating content cross-platform?

Can I automate my Linkedin posts to be posted on Twitter?
Can I share my Tweets on Instagram stories?

That’s a totally different kind of automation and the answer is yes as long as it’s automated in keeping the native practices of each social platform.

In short, do this:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ryan Holiday (@ryanholiday)

Don’t do this:

Twitter Automation: don't automate IG posts directly on Twitter

Suggested tools to automate tweets to export for other social media platforms (not an affiliate):

 

Automate Own Retweets

As soon as you start creating Tweets, you’ll see that the Pareto principle will apply to your content creation: 20% of your tweets will drive 80% of engagement.

That means that you’ll end up creating 80% of tweets waste (low engagement rate), but you’ll have 20% of tweets to learn from, reuse, and repurpose (high engagement rate).

As soon as you identify a tweet that’s skyrocketing your engagement, you should retweet it not just once… several times.

Why? Remember that Twitter doesn’t filter content and your tweet will end up competing with 500 million tweets.

So, when you have a tweet that performed well in the past, go ahead and re-tweet it.

As a wrap-up, we do recommend automating retweeting your content.

👍  Suggested tools to automate tweets (not an affiliate):

Automate Content Scheduling

Well, this is one of the basic recommendations you’ll find if you want to take your Twitter account to the next level.

For many reasons.

First, consistency.

As soon as your account activity ramps up, you’ll have less time to follow a content schedule without automation.

Accounts making a business from Twitter are tweeting 10, 20, 30, and more tweets a day.

That is hard to achieve without a tool that facilitates the scheduling.

Another major benefit of scheduling tweets is to be able to tackle all your weekly/monthly content creation in a single block period of time.

Working on your Twitter presence takes time.

If you work in small chunks of time, you can feel it’s something that never ends.

You could end up tweeting, interacting, and getting distracted – a lot!

If you concentrate all your content creation for a week/month in just a single block of time, you’ll save endless hours of your day.

Last but not least, tweeting at the right time will help you get the most out of your audience.

Scheduling your tweets at the right time to maximize your exposure will be an easy task with a tool that helps you schedule your tweets.

As a wrap-up, we do recommend automating content scheduling on Twitter.

👍  Suggested tools to automate content scheduling (not an affiliate):