Speeding up the New Follower Approval Process with Tweet Later’s New Semi-Auto Vetting Tool

17 Mar 2009

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tweet Later, their original claim to fame, as the name implies, is a system that allows you to write tweets in advance and then schedule them to be posted later. For those of you that don’t have time to tweet every day this option makes it possible for you to write a bunch of tweets in one go but space their posting out over a specified period instead of deluging your stream all at once.

There are several other excellent options including keyword tracking, auto following, auto unfollowing, and auto DMs included in their free service as well as many “professional” options you can get for a fee but today what I really want to talk about is a very cool new feature they’ve added to their auto follow service, and that is semi-auto vetting.

tweetlater-screen2

Personally I’m still resisting auto following everyone who follows me. In a typical vetting I’d say that I only follow about two thirds of the twits that follow me. Many of them are just plain old spammers or people who are obvioulsy only following me in hopes that I’ll follow them back, others are companies I don’t use and have no interest in, and others are just not interesting to me for one reason or another.

On the other hand, I’ve gotten to the point that I’m getting anywhere from 50 to 100 new followers a day and vetting them manually takes too much time, so I was very happy to see Tweet Later’s new semi-automated vetting option. They’ve put all the information I need to make my decision on one page with a simple radio button to approve or reject or even block new followers. As you can see from the screen shot, at a glance I can see every twit’s avatar (or lack of one), their following/follower counts, the date they joined, their total tweet count, a link to their website, and their latest tweet. In most cases that’s enough information for me to make a pretty darned accurate assessment and instead of a minute or two per follower I can vet a list of 50 in a couple of minutes, total.

If you want to speed things up even more, be sure to click on ’settings’. On the settings page you can select to auto approve or ignore based on several criteria like, generic avatar, no tweets, protected updates, the percent ratio of followers to following, and if they haven’t posted an update in x number of days.

I’m sure that Tweet Later offers something of value to almost everyone using Twitter, but for those of you that are finding it too time consuming to manually vet new followers, you’re going to love this new tool.