Lively is right on the money with this (as he always is with the various lively browser products/plugins).
I have been testing various incarnations of this Pro Browser as it has kind of evolved over time,... now including the features that really throw twitter's network admin/automate suspend programs for a loop, mainly...
- random time between registering accounts for a single twitter account
- loop the adding and removing of friends for accounts, either one at a time or scrolling through them all after a predetermined amount of adds/removes
- automatic suspended account deletion
- proxy support
Now,... just for a few minutes (and at the risk of being called out as a flaming newb), I am going to tell everyone a couple of my techniques when using twitter. I have talked with Lively about them many times as they have developed (mainly, in conjunction with his products), and now I think maybe it's fair to see if anyone else has as much success with them as I have, and to let the collective cleverness of the community see if it can improve upon these.
But to the point,... there are really two ways to market to twitter.
1) Try the semi-white hat approach of targeting people based on their "legitimate follows", where they really are interested in you and there is a higher chance of monetizing "trend-pushes" that you put out there.
****This means - register fewer accounts. Concentrate on developing them organically and with tools like lively's Twitter Friend Adder (it doesn't matter which way you go,... YOU NEED THIS TOOL).
2) Twaam the crap out of them (twitter+spam). Get tons of followers from the public timeline spread across many twitter accounts which you control (which lively's product does already for you), which means getting relatively newb tweeters as followers, which is good, since the newbs are more liable to click on links in your tweets anyway.
**** This means - do MASS ACCOUNT REGISTRATIONS. You will need to enter this game with the understnading that most if not ALL of your mass accounts may eventually be suspended, but that during the 2-3 days you will be operating your campaigns, you will be able to tweet to 1000's before your accounts are suspended for "aggressive following" (as Twitter puts it).
Now, for those of you who really don't know that much about Twitter and how it suspends, let me give you a brief background. I am the dir. of IT for my company in the U.S. - and even though (to be fair) I a am really a total newb to this forum,... I am not a newb to autoposting software. Every time a new one comes out, I always pay the premium amount and get my hands on it and then run through all kinds of horrible and sometimes inane tests to see what it can and cannot do.
For the purposes of this post, I'm only going to get into point #2), because that's the one I do best, and that's the one I've been making money with. I also do nto encourage anyone to continue reading if you do not want to invest a little something to make you Twitter campaigns viable. You MUST at least purchase lively's product to have any prayer of monetizing twitter. For those who want to continue, here goes...
So let me break it down like we're building a model airplane,... parts you will need.
-Livley's Twitter Friend Adder Pro 2.00
-Proxyfirewall 1.04 (Beta) - or any version
-iMacros (preferably the mid range product - or, be able to pay a good hired gun, perhaps in here, a coupld of bucks to write you the VBS script for Tweetlater auto-adder - you will see what I mean below)
-Twitter Genius which you can get @ twitterblaster-dot-com(a TERRIBLE BUGGY PROGRAM which you might not want to install on your main box, but it is so freakin' quick at doing MASS Twitter account registrations, I couldn't get along without it)
- an entrepreneurial spirit and the willingness to give up one weekend to get your "machine" up and running,... after which, you'll barely have to manage anything again (that is until Twitter changes its security/countermeasures)
Information that is good to know:
-As far as I and my little Twitter ring can tell,... twitter does not have enough human network admins (or "spam marshalls" as they like to call them - if anyone doubts their existence, I will be happy to send you their twitter accounts, where they proudly proclaim the fact that they are employed by Twitter as "spam marshalls" and even link their profiles with all of their fellow twitter employees),... anyway, they don't have enough, so mainly they use some type of network admin program which determines account suspensions based on 4 things,... which are 1) Aggressive following. 2) Unusual followership patterns (if you make your own little ring of accounts all following each other, it will be doomed,... sorry
) 3) Other tweeters listing you as spam. AND 4) IP address recording (THE SHOCK!) - I think I heard everyone gasp at that last one...
Yes. It is true. Many of the "pro's" in here will probably flame me and cell me a newb for syaing this,... but they will all be embarrased after I post this below...
"This e-mail is in regard to the following accounts:
tylerdassman
tweeTRAVEL
tweeTRIVIAL
tweeTECH
tweeTEENIE
TwinsAreAlways1
SmackleWonderMe
AngryAdam
tweeSWEETS
sweeTweet
zanyZebra
yowlingYolanda
crazyCarly
darlingDebbie
elegantElle
tweeFROG
tweeDRAGON
tweeDEVIL
lacubanita
tweeCUBAN
funnyFrannie
graciousGail
gorgeousGenivi
LatinoFirst
handsomeWoman
idleIvy
jumpingJillF
lonelyLilly
marbledMaven
natteringNancy
MuchoTrabajo
DigaMe
LosCalcetines
SnicklePuff
These accounts were suspended due to posting duplicate updates, having been created from the same IP, and participating in aggressive following.
Del
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 8:47 AM, sweeTweet <
[email protected]> wrote:
This is what I DID:
Um.. account suspended? What the crap for?
This is what I EXPECTED to happen:
This is what ACTUALLY happened:
I feel:
--
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Username: sweeTweet
Profile:
http://twitter.com/sweeTweet
USER IS flagged antisocial!
--
Are you following me?
www.twitter.com/delbius "
Did any of you catch that phrase? "having been created from the same IP"
Incidentally, the twitter account above is one of those "spam marshalls". Feel free to register a few bogus accounts and flood him with DMs if you feel so inclined. I did it and it felt great! (That probably kept him busy for a few minutes)... anyway...
You NEED to understand how Twitter works at keeping people like us OUT.
Also, they tend to run their automated network admin program between 2:30 and 3:30 am Eastern Time U.S. on early Thursday morning/Late Wednesday night (if you're like me and up at that time), and also early Monday morning/Late Sunday night.
What does this mean? It means the best time to begin a Blackhat Twitter campaign is 5am Thursday morning.
Of course, no one can predict when Twitter will decide to mix it up on us,... but for now, this seems to be when all of our dummy accounts in our ring bite the dust all at once. Hell, sometimes we just sotp the campaign on Wednesday at around 1am, go out for drinks, come back and start registering the new mass registration. We don't even bother looking anymore. We know they're toast. (Although I am feeding lively some data on my tests with the new Friend Adder this week to see if we retain more than usual).
Anyway, you need all these things, and you need these facts to really construct a good campaign. So how do you do it? I will give you the simple version now (I apologize in advance that I can't go into detail about "how to use this" or "how to use that"... but I will try to point you in the right direction)
1) Fire up Proxyfirewall and load up a list of GOOD, FAST socks5 proxies. If you don't subscribe to their private proxy service, then make sure you see apekillsape Sticky posts on proxies. They will help greatly. You will need socks5 all the way.
2) Fire up twitter genius (you can get it at twitterblaster[dot]com - (again, I would run proxyfirewall/twitter genius on a separate box, because twitter genius STINKS! It is sooo buggy. But it is soooo fast at going through mass account creations. If anyone has a better way, PLEASE let me know!) - now use twitter genius to create 400 twitter accounts. Set the interval at around 4 seconds. So between typing captchas and 1600 seconds of interval, you'll be doing this for about 25 minutes.
3) Export the giant list of accounts using twitter genius. Then use MS Excel to reformat (takes about 2 minutes to do) and import the entire list into Lively's Twitter Friend Adder Pro. (If you want more info on which file contains account info, contact lively - I don't want to step on his toes here, God knows he has helped me enough!)
4) Now (preferably on a separate machine), launch proxyfirewall (if you really want to make it hard for Twitter to suspend you) and Lively's Twitter Friend Adder Pro and immediately start the Friend Adder / Looper with the settings on "10 Friends" , "Every 2-20 seconds" , "All Accounts One by One"... and make sure your rules in proxyfirewall are to rotate proxies by "Single", every 8-10 seconds. Lively's product works SEAMLESSLY with proxyfirewall.
5) Check off the proxy function in Lively's product if you don't choose to use proxyfirewall (or even if you do, for an added measure).
6) Let them roll for about 24 hours. You will then have 400 accounts with 2-4 followers each (now you are controlling almost 1600 followers). If you want more, do more, but change the settings to "First 5 accounts" "100 Friends" "60-600 Seconds"... that will realy spike the followers on each affected account
7) Once you have enough (which for me is about 2000 - 5000 followers), launch the iMacros browser (you may have to contact their support to ask them which variables to use for an extract and fill for Tweetlater).
8) Upload that mass account list to the web somewhere as an HTML file (just save it like that from MS Word or soemthing)... then create and run a script in iMacros that extracts each account name and password and adds it as a managed account in your main TweetLater account (if you do not know what tweetlater is, please look it up -- I am not trying to be rude... just for the sake of time). DO NOT MAKE MORE THAN 70 ACCOUNTS IN TWEETLATER.
9) Do the same for each main tweetlater account you have until all of your twitter accounts are registered.
10) Type your tweets for the first of each of the tweetlater accounts and then "copy" them to the others. Make sure you hit the distribute button on all of the others so that tweets go out at different times. (Or make an iMacros script for click in the distribute button it to save your own time).
11) Viola. Now all your accounts will tweet whatever 10 -100 tweets you wanted to send out over then next 'n' days, distributed at random times, plus...
...all your accounts were registered from different IPs.
...all your accounts have rather limited followings so aggresive following shouldn't be any issue.
...by the time Twitter figures out that the same tweet "phrases" were used, you'll be long gone and doing the same thing all over again.
12) Furthermore, if you're like me, you can sell this "tweetcloud" of advertising to a band, music group, upcoming website" for a couple of hundred. That's basically what I do. But that last step is realy for more sales-types.
But you MUST have lively's product to make this work. Can't stress that enough. Twitter Genius is a big time save too, but you can do without it.
That's it. If anyone has a Twitter mass registration program that they know can beat the Captcha, pleas let me know!
Love ya'll!
-GiveItLegs
"Giving Crappy Campaigns Legs since 2000"