Hummingbird from Messiab Labs is very limited in features when compared to our top Twitter marketing product, Tweet Adder, and in essence it does one thing… but it does that one thing quite well. “FindTargetted Followers” within Hummingbird, as with the similar function in Tweet Adder, allows you to follow Twitter users who are themselves following a Twitter account which is relevant to your subject. The difference is that, in Hummingbird’s case, a fair degree of manual intervention is required.

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.