Finding quality people to follow on Twitter is always challenging and time-consuming.

We’ve added a much requested feature, namely mimic following to help you easily find quality Twitter accounts to follow.

With mimic following you give us the usernames of a few Twitter users of your choice. We analyze those users’ Following list (the people they follow) and present the entries of the Following lists to you in batches in the Vet Followers/Friends area. You then decide whether you want to follow or reject each entry.

Benefit from the work that others have done to surface quality people to follow in your areas of interest. You only need to find the right people whose following you want to mimic.

The new feature is available to Professional users and can be found under Followers/Friends, Friend Finder in the menu.

Please note that starting July 8th, 2013, new followers that you want to follow back must be individually approved using Followers/Friends, Vet Followers/Friends in the menu. This change is required by the July 2nd, 2013, change in Twitter’s rules.

If you elected to follow-back and send auto-welcome-DMs, then auto-welcome-DMs will be sent to all new followers (within Twitter’s DM sending limits) regardless of whether you approve the followers for follow-back or not. In other words, the sending of welcome-DMs is not influenced any longer by any decision you record on the vetting page, it happens regardless.

If you elected to only send welcome-DMs and not follow back new followers, then there is nothing you need to do. The sending of welcome-DMs will continue as before.

Please note that on July 2nd, 2013, Twitter changed their terms of service and outlawed automated following back of people who followed you first.

You can follow an ongoing discussion about the matter here:

https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/19337

Unfortunately we have no choice but to modify our system to comply with Twitter’s new rules.

Hence, from Monday, July 8th, 2013, the manual vetting option of new followers will be automatically enabled on all accounts that currently have the auto-follow option enabled. If you do not manually approve the follow-back, as Twitter now requires, then the follow-back will not take place.

If you are not using auto-follow-back but are just using the auto-welcome-DM, then your account will not be affected. Auto-welcome-DMs will continue as before without any change, and you do not have to do anything.

If you are using both auto-follow-back and auto-welcome-DM on a Twitter account, then you will need to manually approve each new follower, as per Twitter’s new requirements, for that new follower to be followed-back and to receive the welcome-DM.

If you have any issues with or concerns over this new Twitter policy, please contact Twitter directly via support.twitter.com or by commenting on the discussion thread linked to above, or both.

Should Twitter in the future decide to again allow auto-follow-back, we would be more than happy to restore the auto-follow-back service that you have found so useful for such a long time. We’re as dumb-founded by Twitter’s decision as you are.

We added two exciting features that many find extremely helpful.

The first feature is a Twitter direct message digest, where we send you a list of the new DMs that you have received on selected Twitter accounts since the last DM digest. The emails are sent to you once per day.

The second new feature is the ability to schedule and bulk upload updates that contain multiple lines (text that contains line breaks). This is helpful for formatting Facebook updates, and it works for Twitter tweets as well.

Both features require a Professional subscription and are included at no extra charge for existing Professional accounts.

Clean out your Twitter account by purging all your tweets. Start over with a clean slate. Without losing your followers and the people you follow.

You can now ask SocialOomph to do that for you. It is available free of charge to all our members.

To use it, login to your SocialOomph account, then navigate to “Scheduled Updates, Purge Twitter Tweets” in the menu.

Imagine when Mary sends an email from mary@yourdomain.com to technicaltips@yourdomain.com, that email is published as a social update on your Twitter account, tagged with ^Mary, and on your Facebook Page with no author tag. When she sends an email from mary@yourdomain.com to marketingtweets@yourdomain.com, the email is published as a social update to your Twitter account, tagged with ^MaryM. When Peter sends an email from peter@yourdomain.com to marketingtweets@yourdomain.com, the email is published to your Twitter account, tagged with ^Peter.

That’s what you can do with our brand-new “Submit Social Updates via Email” feature, and more.

Email from approved source –> Email account you own –> Social update –> Your social account(s)

Imagine you, and your employees, being able to:

• Send emails from their existing email addresses to an email address that you own (on your own server, or on Gmail, Hotmail, etc.);
• Have those emails turned into standard social updates and published on your Twitter account(s), your Facebook account(s), your Facebook Page(s), and other social accounts;
• Have the updates automatically tagged with an author tag that you define (eg., ^Mary or ^JohnD);
• Append a URL to the update text, which will automatically be shortened via either dld.bz or bit.ly, from where you can get click stats;
• Submit social updates for all your social accounts in this manner using only email and one SocialOomph Professional account;
• Do it securely so that only authorized email addresses can submit social updates.

Being able to create social updates from emails is particularly useful where:

• You browse the web and email a link to that web page via your browser’s menu, or via an “email” link on the web page itself (provided that you can specify the From address);
• You want several people to contribute updates to your social accounts with minimum disruption of their work routines and maximum efficiency.

This feature is included in SocialOomph Professional. If you have a Professional account, then you have access to it.

Login to your SocialOomph account to access the feature.

It is under “Scheduled Updates, Send Updates via Email” in the menu.

You probably agree that it is tough to find good quality people to follow on Twitter and Google Buzz. It is even more difficult to get interested and engaged people to follow you.

There is now a solution.

The best place to meet others is at the hub, where everyone else is also looking for the same thing you are looking for. To grow your list of followers and friends, and do so with good quality accounts.

Here are a few highlights:

– Easily find thousands of potential friends that meet your specific criteria.

– Make yourself findable for your specific keywords.

– Show your custom profile description to people who find you, and even do A/B split testing on your profile description.

– Roll all your new followers on all your social accounts (Twitter and Buzz) into one group where you can easily review them and decide if you want to follow, ignore, or block them. This is a mighty time saver.

– Place the people you followed on all your social accounts into one common group, where you can monitor them to see what they tweeted, are they following you back, have they become dormant, etc.

There’s a lot more.

FollowerHub.com is your powerful multi-account friend and follower management tool. It is not one of those shady follower acquisition schemes that will get you into trouble with Twitter.

Even though the features included in the launch version are very powerful, we are already working on even more awesome additions.

Check it out now.

http://www.followerhub.com

You got to be at the hub.

Brought to you by the owners of SocialOomph.com. In addition to power and time-saving at your fingertips, you also get the same stellar support that you’ve grown accustomed to at SocialOomph.

We’ve released the first round of Google Buzz integration in SocialOomph.

You can now schedule Buzz posts in exactly the same way that you can schedule Twitter tweets and Facebook updates.

In addition, your Buzz posts can have attached links to external sites and pages, as well as attached photos.

The Buzz API (the part of the Buzz system that we integrate with) is still very new, and needs additional work by Google before we can add additional Buzz features. That’s why we call this release only the first round.

Google Buzz integration is available to both Free and Professional users.

Professional users have additional features, such as recurring posts and drip-feeding their Buzz accounts available to them.

Select “Social Accounts, Add New Account, Add Buzz” in the menu to add your Buzz profile to your list of social accounts.

When I created the SocialOomph service (it was then known as TweetLater) back in April 2008, one of the first features I added was the ability to automatically unfollow somebody that unfollows you.

That feature has always been part of our Free services, and it has been popular and running non-stop until today.

But, it is now no more. It’s done. It’s kaput. It has been switched off.

Today, May 13th, 2010, a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team informed me that the auto-unfollow feature was breaking their automation rules.

And lo and behold, there actually is a one-liner in those rules that says, “Automated un-following is also not permitted.” Either I did not notice that sentence, or Twitter added it into their rules after I last checked that rules page.

But, that’s besides the point.

To comply with their rules, I’ve disabled the auto-unfollow feature on Twitter accounts. You can still auto-unfollow on StatusNet accounts, and it also does not affect any of the other features of the service.

Really sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.

Dewald Pretorius
Owner of SocialOomph.com

With our normal update scheduling system, you are required to enter either a fixed date and time or a relative time on every update that you schedule. But what if you had a bunch of updates and you just want the system to drip-feed them into your social accounts, without having to worry about scheduling each one individually?

That’s where the new Update Queues come in.

Each Queue has an update Reservoir attached to it. You put updates into the reservoir, and the Queue drip-feeds those updates into your social accounts over time.

You can connect a Queue to one specific social account, or you can connect it to several social accounts (in which case it will simultaneously drip-feed the updates into all those connected social accounts).

You can also connect more than one Queue to a specific social account, which means you can have several Queues that automatically feed that social account.

For example:

1. Let’s say you create one Queue that you call your “quotes” queue, you also create another Queue that you call your “interesting links” queue, and you create a third Queue that you call your “cool photos” queue.
2. You connect your “quotes” queue to your Twitter account and your Facebook account to drip-feed your quotes into those accounts at a rate of one quote every 12 hours.
3. The “interesting links” queue you connect to your Twitter, StatusNet, and Facebook accounts, and you configure it to drip-feed your interesting links into those accounts at a rate of one update every 3 hours.
4. Lastly, you decide to connect your “interesting photos” queue to your recipes Facebook Page account and your cooking-related Twitter business account, because you’re only going to put links to pics of prepared meals into that reservoir, and you drip-feed your photo links into the accounts at a rate of one update every day.
5. Optionally, you can tell the system to drip-feed the updates only on Monday through Friday, between 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM (these days and times are fully configurable per queue).
6. Now all you need to do is make sure that there are updates in those reservoirs. The system does the rest. You don’t have to spend one second on scheduled dates or times.

If you want, the system will email you when a reservoir has run dry, so that you can add more updates to it.

You add updates to a reservoir with either the standard New Update form (which you use for creating a new scheduled update), or you can bulk upload updates into a reservoir using the Bulk Update Upload feature.

Update are drip-fed from the reservoir in the order they were added, in other words, first-in-first-out.

The drip-fed updates automatically appear as scheduled updates in update lists in SocialOomph from where they are then published to the social accounts by the system.

The Queues feature is available under “Scheduled Updates, Queue Reservoirs” in the menu.

Queues are available only to SocialOomph Professional users.