A friend of mine the other day said he wanted to do a massive list building campaign on Twitter.  That’s not something I normally advocate, but he’s a friend so I agreed to give him my thoughts.  He was so thrilled, I thought I would share it with all of you too.

Set up several accounts.  The reason is that not only are you going to be trying different strategies to appeal to different markets, but I’m assuming that some of these strategies are going to cause Twitter to disable your account.  So set them up with different emails too.  Make sure they all have pictures of a person’s face (preferably a woman, but test it) and her name as the username.

On one of them use TweetAdder. I think it’s a free program, and you just follow the directions for setting it up.  It will add and remove friends, send automated tweets, etc.

On one of them use TweetSpinner. It costs $15/mo but you can set up as many as 5 accounts with it, so that’ll be good if you like the results you get from it.  It’s similar to TweetAdder, but has some different features.

Another program I could suggest is Hummingbird.  I’ve never looked at it personally so I couldn’t tell you much about it, but I know people who have used it and like it.

Finally, set up another account that you do all the work manually. Of course this will be more time consuming, but because you’ll be nose to nose with the data, you’ll learn more about your customers.  So you’d use probably SocialOomph to set up your alerts for whatever keyword phrases you were itnerested in (plus geography if you want).

Then every day you’d review the tweets including that keyword.  You could click through to each person’s profile if you want to see what else is true about them, as far as their city, their bio, their last few tweets, etc.  And of course then you follow them if you decide they’re the right candidate for you.

Then with all these automated and manual methods, the trick is to get people to start following you back and, more important, listening to you, and most important clicking on your links.  And again, you’ll have to experiment with the strategies to figure out what gives the best results for your particular niche.

You might want to have, for example, one account that does nothing but blast out sales messages.  You might find that if it’s the right sales message, it will get you a high enough percentage of click-throughs that you could conclude that people don’t care you’re a robot, they just want the relief for their back pain (or whatever your offer is).

You’d want to experiment with sending your sales messages as @ replies to the people you just followed who mentioned back pain in their tweet.

Then on another account, you could send out lots of chatty messages – about movies, about the weather, about Justin Bieber, about whatever the trending topics are.  The people who would see and enjoy your messages about the Biebster might now be slightly more likely to see, read and click on your link about back pain. But you wouldn’t be having any conversation with them.  However, you could send #FollowFriday messages to everyone who responds to or Retweet’s your messages, pretty easily.  And everybody notices the people who #FF them.

Then on yet another account, you might try being social and actually writing back to people, and engaging with them.  Of course this would be time consuming, but it is the strategy I recommend for most of my clients.  For the kinds of campaigns I recommend, it works the best.  But this is a massive list-building strategy we’re talking about here.

The final step in all this is unfollowing the people who didn’t follow you back.  Twitter will let you build your account to 2000 people with no restrictions.  But after that, you can’t add more followers until at least 90% start following you back.  The programs I recommend have some capacity for unfollowing people; but you may find yourself doing a lot of manual un-following.

Be sure to let me know your results in the comments section!