Competing with SocialToo for Paid Twitter Services

If you haven’t heard of SocialToo, it is a “computerized personal assistant” for Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

SocialToo is also stealing your money.

Don’t get me wrong. SocialToo offers outstanding services, such as enabling you to automatically follow anyone who follows you (or unfollow anyone who unfollows you), generate automatic direct messages to send to new followers (or block direct messages sent by new people you follow), and offering you a series of surveys so you can poll your Twitter friends.

But if you look at the SocialToo preferences page, additional services cost money:

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• $5 to follow everyone who followed you before you signed up with SocialToo
• $5 to unfollow everyone who isn’t following you back
• $10 to turn off new message notifications on your cellphone
• $25 to delete all of your friends

Amid changing my Twitter follow strategy, I decided 72 hours ago, per this tweet, to run an auto-follow script and follow everyone I was previously unfollowing (or the first bullet above).

Despite my prior creation of a SocalToo account, I never synchronized it with my @ariherzog Twitter account. How do you explain my success in following everyone who I previously was unfollowing without spending $5?

Enter twiPing, a contact management solution in the form of a Windows software program you can download to your computer. How it works is you log into your account, it loads your friends and followers, and you can conduct batch operations with a click of a few buttons. So, in my case, I loaded my friends and followers, selected only my followers I was unfollowing, and asked the program to follow all. Thirty minutes later, over 5,000 people and organizations who previously were following me I was reciprocally following.

You can argue with me over the merits of my actions and why I’m changing my Twitter rules (which I’ll delve into deeper in a future blog post), but the fact I’m paying attention to here is I did it for free, without coughing over $5. In fact, if you scroll above to the four bullets, twiPing enables me to do all but the third for free; that’s a savings of $35 that SocialToo requires for its premium services.

TwiPing is only one service, and others include Mutuality and TwitterMass. I recognize companies are launching left and right to offer you personalized Twitter services for a price. But when competition allows the same services to be performed for free, why pay the money?

Photo credit: velo city

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