Autoresponders, good or bad?

I’ve been reading about certain faux pas when it comes to using Twitter and one was specifically about the use of Auto responders.


Anyone using e-mail clients like Outlook and services like Exchange will be familiar with setting up out of office replies and other responders. Social networks like Ecademy allow you to send an auto response when someone hits your profile but are auto responders a useful tool or annoyance and could they work on Twitter?

Specifically an auto responder could automatically e-mail someone that follows you OR even someone that unfollows you but how it works is quite key.

The obvious approach is to either:-

1. Snapshot a users friends list and cache into a DB regularly, compare subsequent snapshots to see who has been added, left etc and respond accordingly to the differences.

2. Write a robot that responds to mail notifications, pick up twitter follow emails, parse them and post a response. This doesn’t solve the unfollows however.

If you needed both then option 1 is the best one, otherwise option 2 is a quick win for follow responders. Oh and a service like this would need your Twitter credentials to be able to work properly so that could be a problem.

The challenge with this service however is making the auto responders look personalised.

One way around this is to produce something that will group followers and unfollowers together so that instead of:-

“@another, thanks for following”
“@whatsisface, thanks for following”
“@lastbutnotleast, thanks for following”

etc we end up with:-

“@another, thanks for following”
“Welcome @whatsisface, @someoneelse and @lastbutnotleast, thanks for following.”

You could also vary the surrounding text for both single and multiple follows making the look more natural AND time delay the responses so they don’t happen immediately but at an interval between say immediate and 24 hours. All of this will help it look more like you are responding and mix in these responses with your normal tweets.

It’s just a thought for now, any comments welcome.