Social Sniper - Building Your Brand Using Twitter

As Twitter continues to gain massive popularity worldwide, new custom tools emerge, and clever marketers and entrepreneurs see the possibilites of this pretty simple yet extremely powerful social platform.

Not too long ago, I started testing out Ian Fernando’s Social Sniper (formerly known as Twit Sniper). This tool was first introduced on Wickedfire and received an avalanche of positive reviews and thumbs up. From the moment you start playing around with this tool - you will quickly begin to see the potential.

Now before I go on - let me post a disclaimer..

Social Sniper can be a very powerful tool whether you use it for right or wrong. It should not be abused and overused though. Make sure you take a look at Twitter’s official terms on Spam and Abuse before you think about raising hell. Some reasons Twitter will suspend you for are:

- If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time
- If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period
- If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people
- If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following
- If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates

So don’t go out creating dozens of Twitter accounts, mass-follow (or unfollow) thousands of people in a few days, or mass-message people with your spammy links at random. You get the point.

However - DO use Social Sniper to find people or businesses who are interested in your topics. Tweeters you can follow - who in return may follow you back.

Ok, let’s get the hard facts and features out of the way first:

• What is it?
  A targeted auto-follower and mass-messaging tool for Twitter
• What can it do?
  Find and follow large numbers of people on Twitter based on topics (keywords) you specify. This in turn results in some of those people wanting to follow you back - resulting in an increase in followers.
• Why would you want it?
  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the more Twitter followers you have for a given niche, the more you can turn that base of followers into something useful. Build up your own brand or domain, get targeted visitors to your website, gather recognition for your band/blog/forum/product/organization/whatever.
• How much does it cost?
  $27.97/month, backed by a 60-day money back guarantee
• Does it work?
  Yes, it sure does.

As soon as you sign up, you get access to all the tutorial videos and the forum that teaches you how it all works. All parts of the tool are very easy to use. Ian also told me they are adding some new features soon that will really improve the tool even further.

Twitter allows a certain ratio of following vs. followers. What this means is that if your account is following 2000 people, but only 20 people are following you - that looks suspicious, and Twitter might flag you for a ban. Like any other new social platform, they hate seeing Twitter used as a free-for-all spam anarchy and they are aware that tools such as Social Sniper exists.

And this is why I started the post with my disclaimer. Always keep within the bounds and limits suggested to you by Social Sniper. The tool will let you know if you are trying to follow too many people and you don’t have enough followers yet. Take the time to clean out your “following” list once in a while. (Many of the accounts you find will be basically worthless bots or spammers anyway) so that you can keep growing your follow base off of real people continually.

Now, every aspiring online entrepreneur knows that automation is one of the keys to scaling success. By automating your tasks, you save time. Social Sniper lets you schedule your follow routines while you’re asleep or away, and in ways that are within the terms of Twitter (unless you specifically ignore that and blast your account onto the ban boat).

I mentioned targeted visitors earlier too. How targeted? How about down to geographic locations (such as only finding followers from a city or zip-code), or using the advanced keyword selector to pinpoint exactly those words you do or don’t want to find in people’s tweets. You can even find tweets only mentioning certain tweeters, or within certain timeframes (such as people talking about gift ideas, but only during Christmas season).

And…you can follow the followers of a certain person if you like as well. For example, you know of a few authority bloggers in a niche who already have a good-sized following. Social Sniper can attempt to follow those same followers, so that your account can trigger interest from those people as well. Pretty cool!

There is no limit to how many basic or advanced keywords you can add. Social Sniper eventually goes through them all and finds anyone triggering your search, and you can watch this happening in real-time, or walk away while it does its job.

Overall, this tool does its job well. I’ve used it to launch some side project hobby sites I have, and within a short time increased visitors, readers, and comments on my new sites. Within a week or two - you can easily create lots of interest (and permanent readers) to your new blog or site that you literally started from scratch with no SEO or paid traffic.

You can then use that momentum to either build up your site’s traffic further, or monetize your site however you would like. In this way, Social Sniper quickly pays for itself. Plus - there is no limit to the number of accounts you use this with.