Tweet Adder is Twitter marketing software, aimed at building the biggest relevant audience you can with the least amount of effort. Like the other marketing tools reviewed here, it’s not what you will be using to actually tweet to your audience, nor will it help you with actually reading and interacting with the tweets of others. For that, you’ll need to chose a desktop tool like TweetDeck or the even better Seesmic Desktop, or an online Twitter reader like Hootsuite. But for building and managing your follower list, while you’re fast asleep, this is the tool that you’ll need.

The key tool within Tweet Adder is the follower function, which allows you automatically follow hundreds of Twitter members from your ‘To Follow’ list every day? And what is your ‘To Follow’ list, you might ask? It’s a list of thousands of Twitter members discovered by Tweet Adder based on the criteria that you provide. Criteria can be keyword based, either within members’ bios or in tweets themselves, or you can choose to add either the followers of a certain Twitter member or the people that the member is following.

The latter methods are possibly the best ways to find targetted followers for your subject topic… Identify a recognised expert in your field who has several thousand followers, and then add those followers to your “To Follow” list using Tweet Adder, a completely automated process once you enter the Twitter name of the ‘expert’. You’ll then have thousands of Twitter users which Tweet Adder can automatically follow for you over the course of a few days, and if your Twitter content is relevant you can be sure that a large percentage of those users will follow you back. And so your audience grows.

Inevitably some users that you follow won’t follow you back, and Tweet adder takes care of that too. You can set it to automatically unfollow users that you have used Tweet Adder to follow after a certain number of days, with the default being three days. So if they don’t follow you within that time frame, they’ll be unfollowed. The purpose of this is to keep your follower / following ratio at a reasonable level so you don’t look like a spammer, and it also means that you can try to follow them, and get their attention, at a later date.

Tweet Adder allows you to follow and unfollow in an automated way at a set time every day, so it will gradually follow all of your “To Follow” list and unfollow those that don’t follow you back. Daily limits are used to again ensure that these activities don’t assume spammer proportions to keep your Twitter account in good standing.

The two areas that Tweet Adder could improve are interface and performance. The interface is reasonably clear but just looks a little dated and in need of a “2.0″ revamp, whilst on underpowered PCs the interface often freezes while it’s undertaking its tasks (although it generally comes back to life if you just leave it be). The software is updated frequently though, so hopefully performance and interface enhancements will be forthcoming in a future release, and these minor downsides certainly don’t really impact on use of the application.

Conclusion

Tweet Adder is the most comprehensive Twitter marketing software out there, with more options and features than most of us will ever need.

Tweet Adder costs $55 dollars for a single Twitter account, $74 for up to 5 accounts, $110 for 10 accounts and $188 for unlimited profiles, which means you could also provide Twitter account building within a Social Media Marketing service. Your Tweet Adder account can be upgraded by paying the difference to upgrade to the next account level. The outlay is overall much better value than similar web based services that may charge up to $30 a month, and it can sit and pretty much run itself once you’ve set it up. All in all, a very useful piece of software. It’s what we use, and if you’re serious about Twitter marketing, you should too. Definitely recommended!

Using the built in browser within Hummingbird, the user needs to browse to a relevant account whose followers you also want to follow, click through to the followers list, and then click a button on Hummingbird to follow them all. Hummingbird’s browser then simulates a user onTwitter’s web site to follow all the users on the page, click next and then keep following, until the last page is reached. When there are thousands of followers in the list, this process takes some time, but worse than that we found that Hummingbird would often lose its way, resulting in it getting stuck on a certain page. The only way to resume following those accounts on the list is to restart the whole process, which wastes a lot of time and also presumably looks rather odd to Twitter, as you try to ‘refollow’ the first users in the list to reach the users later on.

For unfollowing, Hummingbird allows you to browse to your own follower list and then click on ‘Unfollow All’, which will result in Hummingbird browsing through the list and unfollowing anyone that has not followed you back. This process is again far more manual than the equivalent process in Tweet Adder, which can do this for you every day without so much as a mouse click.

Hummingbird states that it does, like Tweet Adder, restrict the number of follows you can achieve to keep within Twitter’s limits and avoid being labelled a spammer, but unlike Tweet Adder there is no apparent way to adjust this for different accounts. It also allows you to avoid following accounts that you have previouslyunfollowed, plus maintain a list of VIP accounts that will never be unfollowed by the software.

Conclusion

Hummingbird is a useful tool for manually finding relevant Twitter users with big followings, and then following those follower lists so that some of them follow you back, and can be a good complement to the more complete feature set of Tweet Adder. For now, though, as an overall Twitter marketing toolkit, Hummingbird is some way behind the competition.

Hummingbird costs $97, and can be used with unlimited Twitter accounts on up to two PCs.