twittollower: A Lesson in Marketing and Product Pricing

By: Shane On: February 5th, 2010 —

If you’re on a few Internet marketing mailing lists, you’ve no doubt received plenty of messages endorsing twittollower, a new twitter automation service. twittollower is not unique in what it does: Programs like Hummingbird, tweetadder and many, many more have been around for quite a long time already. But twittollower is unique in the way it’s being marketed and it’s at the same time amusing and fascinating.

Let’s have a look at what twitter automation does in general and what sets twittollower apart. Oh, and in case you’re already rolling your eyes because you can’t take another endorsement for this service: Don’t worry, this is definitely not an endorsement.

Twitter Automation in General

Okay, let’s have a quick look at the basics: For marketing purposes, what you want to achieve on twitter is to get as many people as possible following you, you want those people to be interested in what you tweet about (and more importantly, what you sell) and you want them to be responsive (i.e. tweet back when you ask a question and click on links when you tweet them).

The problem is that you can’t make people follow you on twitter. All you can do is send tweets and follow other people.

Sometimes, when you follow someone, they will follow you back. Not always, but following people and hoping for re-follows is basically the best shot you have at growing your follower count from within twitter.

Since there are certain limits to how many people you can follow and you probably don’t want to spend all day tending to your twitter account(s), this is where the automation comes in.

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Hummingbird, tweet adder and twittollower

I have picked out two more twitter automation systems out of dozens, maybe hundreds that are available. The reason is simply that these two are, as far as I can tell, the most popular and best-established systems among the pack.

Hummingbird and tweet adder are very similar. Both are software programs that you download and run from your desktop. They connect to your twitter account (or multiple accounts) through the twitter API. Both of them let you search for people in your market in various ways (keyword search in member profiles, tweets etc.), you can set them to automatically follow a certain amount of people each day, according to certain criteria, you can tell them to un-follow people who are not following you back and to follow people who follow you, but you aren’t following yet.

You can also use them to schedule tweets and send automatic direct messages to people who follow you. Those aren’t all the features these two programs offer, but you get the idea.

Now, here’s the really interesting thing:

tweet adder costs $55 if you want to use it for just one account, $74 if you want to use if for five accounts and $188 if you want to use it with an unlimited amount of accounts.

Hummingbird costs $97 and lets you use unlimited accounts.

twittollower, on the other hand, costs $97 per month, for just one account.

And as far as I know, this was the introductory price and it’s about to increase.

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twittollower = Magic

How can twittollower possibly survive against established competition that is available at a fraction of the cost? After all, even the most expensive option, the unlimited tweet adder service, costs less than twittollower by the third month you’re using it.

Surprisingly though, twittollower is doing quite well (at least, as far as I can tell).

The reason for this is simple and you’ll see it if you go and have a look at the sales-video. Now, the sales-video might change once they increase the price, but currently, it’s a pretty long video that you can’t navigate through (if you try, it always skips back to the beginning of the video) and it features Tahir Shah trying his best to use hypnotic suggestions and your typical “NLP-talk” throughout the video (yes, he’s definitely trying too hard).

It also doesn’t feature any explanations of what twittollower actually does.

The video goes to great lengths to tell you about how incredibly powerful twitter is and how it’s going to make you millions and how twittollower does everything on autopilot and how it will “get people to follow you” etc. But it never tells you what really goes on in the background. It doesn’t list any features.

And that’s where the magic lies.

With something like tweet adder, you clearly see that it’s a program and it requires user-input and then it goes and does certain things. In fact, it gives you a lot of control over the things it does, so it’s almost entirely transparent.

twittollower, on the other hand, just tells you that it will make your twitter following grow at an amazing rate and that you’ll make tons of money from those followers and that they should be charging $900 a month for it (they really do say that in the video).

In other words: A “common” twitter automation system is a useful tool, while twittollower will magically fulfil your dreams all by itself.
I think it’s clear to see which one of those options is more enticing.

For all we know, when you sign up with twittollower, someone creates a tweet adder or Hummingbird account for you and does the basic setup. We’ll never know and that’s why we’re willing to pay much, much more for twittollower than for those other tools.

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What Else is New?

If you’ve seen a fair amount of IM product launches, this won’t be news to you. Practically every get-rich-quick system has a sales-pitch that is heavy on hopes and dreams and promises of money and very thin on factual information.

At the end of the day, this kind of promotion just gets more sales and allows for higher prices.

On the one hand, you can look at your own sales-processes and ask yourself if you’re applying this method as well. On the other hand, you can ask yourself if you want to be part of the dream-sellers or not.

As for twitter automation: It’s something I’ll probably take a stab at, sometime. You’ll get a nice round of reviews out of it, of course. For now, though, I have other priorities.

Have you tried any twitter automation system? What’s been your experience? Or what do you think of this whole twittering and dream-selling business in general? I’d love to hear your thoughts down in the comments!

Cheers,