Might as well ask a question:
How would you propse to increase the exposure of your twitter account using methods other than tools to add friends/send messages?
Twitter is time consuming to my knowledge I will be honest I have accounts with 20k followers and 8k followers and few others. To date I have not had any great success with my accounts I do get usual visitors now and then but other than that nothing else.
Thing to note I do not spam affiliate links I am more into getting readers for my blogs that I run.
Some of the best ways to user Twitter --
1. Never send an update, nobody reads the timeline, they are being spammed with tons of other timelines so its useless, that is where the direct messages (DM) comes into play, you send DM to your followers, I think there is a restriction now in the past there was none so I used to spam them.
But there is a way around this if you are using TwitterFriend pro, what you can do is that make 4-5 accounts and add friends on them and start sending DM in each one of them. So you can send daily 200 DM per account which is not bad I think TwitterPro has that feature where you can delay the messages. You will see a lot more CTR this way. But you must make sure, that you are not spamming same people over different profiles.
This is where some manual work comes in, but I think twiitter pro has some feature to add and remove friends based on a list.
Another important thing over Twitter is that you must be NICHIFIED what I mean with that is if you have a twitter profile then it must be targeted to your niche you must become an expert in that niche and start sending appropriate updates and links related to that niche that way you will get more clicks to your links even through timeline. This is where people go wrong , many people just create accounts and start adding random people, it does not work that way. It is better you have 50 followers that convert than 20k that dont even click your links.
Another tip is that you must be active around twitter and interact with the followers which is not easy, I mean to be honest I would not spend hours twitteering shit around its just waste of time, thats where you can use a bot to send random quotes or random links. But like I said if you are into a niche then it is better to spend say 10-15mins a day interacting with your followers.
Also use TweetDeck it is just one awesome tool.. hope this answers your question.