FlashTweet (http://www.flashtweet.com) is an inexpensive Twitter application for getting more targeted followers on Twitter.  At $6.95 per month it may very well be one of the cheapest ways to develop and manage your following.  There is a 14 day free trial period.  FlashTweet has a very simple and easy to use interface that you access from your web browser.  I found out about FlashTweet from the Renegade Professional training videos.

Manage All Your Twitter Accounts

Flash tweet claims to be a complete Twitter account management solution.   With it, you can monitor multiple Twitter accounts, and you can mass follow people based on search terms and geographic location. It also helps you find out who you are following, but who is not following you back.  In this case,  you can drop the non-followers with a single mouse click.   FlashTweet calls this “mass unfollowing.”  FlashTweet also helps you find out who is following you that you’re not following back.  In this case, you can choose who you want to follow in return.  You can do a  “mass follow” with one click, or you can manually choose which people to follow on an individual basis.

4 Programs in One

FlashTweet is divided into 4 Twitter applications that you control through a single dashboard.

1. Follower Management tool
   The Follower Management tool allows you to mass follow and mass unfollow your Twitter friends. For example, if you’re following people who aren’t following you back, you can drop just the people who aren’t following you back. You can also see who is following you that you may want to consider following back.
2. Schedule Tweets
   You can have tweets go out at specific times in your timezone with the Schedule Tweets tool. You just enter the tweet, and the date and time you want it to go out. Very simple. You can schedule as many tweets as you want.
3. Mass Follow tool
   This is my favorite tool in FlashTweet. You can mass follow another user’s friends, or mass follow based on search terms, and a geographic region (or all three). For example, you could follow everyone who is discussing bicycling in a 20 mile radius around Manhattan.

   Better still, if you know someone who’s got a big following in your area, such as Ann Sieg or Mike Klingler in the “Attraction Marketing” area, you can follow their followers. You can narrow those followers down by a search term, such as “internet marketing” and your geographical area. If you mass follow the results of such a query, chances are most of them will follow you back. If you like, you can mass unfollow the ones who don’t follow you back (after a few days) using the Follower Management tool (#1 above). Piece of cake.

4. 4. Tweet RSS feeds
   You can tweet the title and link of any RSS feed to your twitter account. This is intended for anyone who has a blog. Makes it easy to tweet a blog post.

Simplicity Has Its Price

Each of these twitter apps is very simple and easy to learn. However, the down side of their simplicity is that they aren’t customizable or programmable. For example, with the Follower Management tool, you can’t set up a group of people you want to be exempt from mass actions. Suppose I’m following Tony Robbins, but he’s not following me back. However, I want to continue following him anyway. So, I would like to make Tony Robbins exempt from any mass unfollow. Unfortunately, you can’t maintain an exemption list in FlashTweet. However, you can get around the problem by setting up a special Twitter account with just the people you want to follow unconditionally. Maybe not the most convenient solution, but it does work.  This is sometimes called a “kludge.”

Another problem comes from Twitter’s restrictions on mass following.  If you follow more than 100 new people per day, Twitter may shut down your account.  This means that you need to run FlashTweet’s Mass Follow tool each day you want to add 100 followers. It’s a long way to 2000 followers.  Unfortunately, there’s no automatic mode that will do this repeatedly for you.

Worth The Money

Even with these limitations, FlashTweet provides enough value to be well worth the $6.95 per month.  The Mass Follow tool together with the Follower Management tool is a simple and convenient way of prospecting for new followers.   What I like best is that you can find new followers matched to your niche.  That’s gold.  We hope that FlashTweet will add more automation in the future.