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There are a lot of different ways to use twitter.  As such, there are also a lot of ways to build up your twitter presence.  The spectrum ranges from building up your presence and reputation organically by having a lot of personal interaction on twitter to going completely automated.

I’m sure you’ve read that the best way is to be personally present a lot and interact with your community.  While that is true when you want to build your personal brand and create a large community with a lot of interaction, there are times when you may want a more automated account.

That’s why there are so many services out there that can build a business with their automatic twitter services.

I personally have both kinds of accounts.

While I do have some personal accounts where I take a personal hand in everything, I also have accounts where I route rss feeds and simply grow using other strategies.

Now, if it’s worth it to you, you can simply sign up with a paid service such as tweet adder, which will auto follow other twitterers in your niche and grow your following automatically.  This is a complete set and forget service that is a very good option.  If you’d like, they have a free demo that you can take for a spin.  Their accounts range from $55 to $188, with no recurring fees.  If you are planning to set up a twitter account to make money through sponsored tweets or other pay to tweet services, this may make financial sense to you.

However, if you are just starting out and don’t want to spend the money on a paid automated service, I do have a free method for you.

With a few minutes of setup, you can have a fairly easy to use automated system to follow a lot of people quickly.  (If you didn’t know, following people is a good way to get them to follow you back and build your twitter presence)

In order to use my system, you’ll need two things:

1. a free Tweepi account
2. the iMacros add-on (there’s a chrome version and a firefox version)

Create Your Free Tweepi Account

First, create your free tweepi account.

Tweepi is a service that helps you manage your twitter account.  It gives you the option to clear out your twitter account, follow new tweeps, cleanup inactive followers and reciprocate.  Now, tweepi does have a paid option that starts at $7.49 a month, but you don’t need that right now.  Just sign up for a free account.

Once you sign up, you’ll be taken to the dashboard:

You’ll be mainly using two of the options with my method:  follow followers and flush.

Follow followers allows you to pick a twitter profile and start following that person’s followers.  Flush, of course, allows you to unfollow people who are not following you back.  You use this when you hit your follower cap and need to unfollow people.

Now, you’ll see that when you select these options, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can select people and either follow or unfollow them.  In a free account, tweepi shows 20 people per page, which you have to check off manually and then go page by page to keep following or unfollowing.

Here’s a small screenshot of to give you a quick idea of what it looks like:

So, you normally would check off each box and go page by page.  As you can tell, this could be quite a tedious process when you do it manually.  The paid versions show 100-200 people per page and open up more features to you.

So, the idea is to find a way to automate this process, so you don’t have to sit at your computer maniacally clicking away at followers in lots of 20 at a time.

How to set up iMacros

iMacros is an add-on that allows you to set up your own automated macros for your browser.  What that means is that you can record any actions (including mouse clicks) that you do in your browser and then duplicate those actions automatically.  See where I’m headed here?

When you install iMacros, you’ll be able to open up a menu on the side of your browser that gives you a couple of extra options.

You can simply record your own macro by hitting the record button and your mouse clicks and keyboard actions will be recorded.

So, what you want to do is record a macro of yourself clicking through and completing your actions on tweepi.

For example, a macro that selects all the people on the page that you want to follow, then hitting the follow button, and clicking to the next page.

If you want to start from scratch, you can simply record yourself clicking through a page to follow and then save the macro.  You only need to record yourself doing one page.  When you play the macro, you simply select the number of times to repeat the macro and you’ll go through how many different pages that you chose.

Now, if you aren’t comfortable creating your own macro, you can cut and paste mine:

Just copy the above text.  Then you select the demo macro that comes with the add-on.  Click on the edit macro with the demo.  Clear out all of the existing text and replace it with the above text.  Save and close.  You can rename the demo macro to whatever you want.

Now, you will auto follow all the followers on the page and automatically go over to a new page of people to follow with the above macro.  Just select how many times you want the macro to repeat and click play loop.

Now, you also want to create a macro that will go through and auto unfollow people who are not following you, so that you can clear space when you hit your follower cap.  So, just create a new macro with the following text:

This macro will automatically unfollow everyone on the page and go on to the next page.  Again, you simply repeat this loop however many times you want it to go.

Once you hit play loop, you can go do something else.  Every once in a long while, the macro will get stuck on a page.  Just click ok in the error box and it will continue on.

That’s it.  You’ll find that this is pretty quick and simple once it’s all set up.  I would suggest not being too aggressive with following and unfollowing people, as you can get your twitter account banned if you are overly aggressive.  I’ve tested this method on a number of new accounts.  I find following about 300 people a day is a safe amount to bulk follow.  You can follow 300 people several days in a row until you hit your cap.  Then I recommend taking a day off before unfollowing people.  After you unfollow the people that don’t follow you back, take another day off before you start following again.

If you have any suggestions, tips, or questions, leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

About Richard  (300 Posts)

Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.