Wasting My Money So You Don’t Have To

Twitter is all the rage these days, and internet marketers are starting to realize the potential of using Twitter not only as a great branding tool, but also as an effective method of driving traffic and getting conversions for their products. Everywhere I turn, I am bombarded with advertisements and reviews for countless Twitter related products that promise to show you how to get X number of followers in Y weeks. So I decided to see what all the hype was about, and took a look at a product called Brute Force Twitter by Peter Drew.

I didn’t know much about Peter Drew before, but somehow I ended up on his mailing list. It turns out it was because I had created an account on one of his sites, called BadRSS, a pretty useful service for submitting your RSS feeds. Anyway, I got an email in my inbox from him promoting his new product, Brute Force Twitter. Normally this sort of email would go straight to my trash, but for some reason I read the email and sales page. What caught my eye was the fact that he was offering a $1 trial to try the product for 5 days. After 5 days you would be billed $37.50 a month if you wanted to continue to use it. I figured it would be pretty easy to see whether the software could do what it claims to do in 5 days, so I forked over my $1 and signed up.

My Review

The Brute Force Twitter software is actually a very simplistic desktop application that works only on Windows. This is quite unfortunate and annoying as my primary machine is a Mac, so I had to take out a Windows laptop I have and install it on there. The software is linked to your paypal information, so if you cancel your subscription, it will stop functioning.

BruteForce Twitter has two primary modes of operation. The first mode allows you to specify a certain user and the software will go out and follow a random number of followers of this person. The second mode allows you use to specify a search term, and the software will follow people who have used this search term in their tweets. The way Twitter works, when you start following people, a certain percentage of people will start following you back. Therefore, by selecting people or keywords that are related to your niche (ie. internet marketing), you will soon build up a huge set of targeted followers that you will be able to market to. It is possible to do this by hand, but with the help of this application, this can all be done for you in an automated way.

Besides adding followers, the software has one other important function, which is the ability to remove the people you are following. A new Twitter account is limited to following 1000 people and you will need to get 1000 followers before you can start following more people. By pressing the Remove Twitter Friends button, the software will look at all the people you have followed, and remove all the ones that are not following you back. By getting rid of the “dead-weight” every couple of days, this keeps you under the account limits and allows you to follow other people instead who might actually follow you back.

Does It Work?

I’ve only been playing with the software for a couple of days now, but I am definitely seeing results. Check out my twitter account. At the time I write this, I have about 540 followers and growing. I’m sure that after a month or two, my account will have many more followers (Please check back and see). The initial version (1.1) of Brute Force Twitter that I used was actually kind of buggy. One major bug that I experienced was that the Remove Twitter Friends function wasn’t quite working properly and it was removing more people then it was supposed to. However, the new version (1.2) which was just released over the weekend seems to fix most of the issues I was having with it.

Will You Remain A Subscriber?

Well, the software seems to work as advertised, but actually I don’t think I will be staying on and paying the recurring $37.50 a month subscription. I have a few concerns, not just about Brute Force Twitter itself, but regarding these automatic twitter friend bots in general.

1) Your account could get banned at any time.
These types of Twitter bots are explicity against Twitter’s terms of service. Now, Brute Force Twitter itself has some built-in checks to avoid appearing like an automated bot. For example it adds friends at random time intervals. But you will notice that it also has a very nice affiliate program and many affiliates will be promoting it on places such as… Twitter. Just do a search for Brute Force Twitter (or the name of any other twitter bot) on search.twitter.com and you have an easy list of of people to ban. Oops.

2) Are these really “quality” followers?
I could be wrong about this, but my gut feeling is that the majority of the followers that I get through this method will not be following my tweets. In fact, I bet many of the people that are following me are actually using bots themselves. Reading through some the tweets of the people I am now following, the majority of them are busy spamming their own products or other affiliate programs. The way I use my own personal Twitter account, I only follow people that I am really interested in. I have never followed anyone just because they followed me. Perhaps I am just in the minority, but it remains to be seen what the quality of my followers are.

3) Twitter Bots are easy to create.
I know not everyone can program, but if you can, it is actually pretty trivial to develop your own Twitter Bot. Which is why we are seeing such a widespread proliferation of them. Check out this one I created in about a couple of hours this past weekend. It does everything that Brute Force Twitter does, plus it works on my Mac. The Twitter API is free to use and there are client libraries available for a variety of different programming languages.

Wasting Money Or Making Money With Twitter Bots

All that said, I have actually come to the conclusion that you can make quite a bit of money with Twitter bots. Not necessarily from marketing products to your Twitter followers but by promoting their affiliate programs. This is where I think Brute Force Twitter has an especially effective model. The product works decently (at least superficially) and it is easy to demonstrate this to your readers with a test account or two. Most people won’t mind paying $1 to try out the software, and when they start getting followers, they will stay on at least a month or two, if not longer. That’s 33% recurring commissions for every month they stay on which is quite good. The affiliate site claims that the $1 trial converts at a rate of 10%, 63% of these turned into full members, and 93% continue to stay on multiple months. That’s pretty impressive if true. You can promote this on Twitter, an email list, or create a money site and do some article marketing. Twitter is in the news everywhere these days so if you want to take advantage of the amazing growth that Twitter is experiencing right now I would take a look at Brute Force Twitter and see if you can make some money with it.

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