Tired of traction channels that require your time?

When looking for new customers, there’s no reason to search for them when you can go to existing sources like your competitor’s fan base.

Now imagine if you could start conversations with your competitor’s fans on Twitter without lifting a finger. You could sit back and relax while receiving more leads, conversions, and generate brand awareness. Does it get any better?

Through automating my Twitter account, I created a hyper-local marketing machine. It helped me build the fastest growing Meetup in San Francisco (1,500 members in 5 months!). This machine also helped me get thousands of people to my events, grew my Twitter following by over one thousand people, and generated hundreds of new leads.

Find & Engage Influencers

To get high-level results, you have to know the top people in your industry on Twitter. You can search for industry influencers using the social discovery and interaction tool, Audiense (you can get a free trial here). To start the search process, click Target then Discover new Twitter Users:

Using Audiense’s discovery tool, you want to plug-in the relevant location and bio keyword(s) of your target prospect. Next, you want to ensure they are active on Twitter. To do this, you set the Time Since Last Tweet to 1 month. And to weed out spammers, set the Tweets per Day to 25 or less.

Finally, select Person, Only public profiles, and the language English (far right of the screenshot).

These settings will ensure you find active influencers in your niche:

From here, you want to find the usernames of those who you think have a valuable audience you’d like to interact with. Once you have that list, download Mass Planner. The software is compatible with PC, but you need a VPS for Mac. In the software, connect your Twitter account.

If your Twitter account is semi-active, then copy the Settings below in the Follow section:

Next, click Follow Sources. From here, you want plug-in the usernames you gathered from Audiense. You can choose to interact with those username’s followings:

Then, you want to jump into Unfollow. From here, if If your Twitter account is active, then copy the settings below:

To take it a step further, you can favorite people who Tweet about your competitor by selecting specific keywords in the Sources section.

Feel free to copy the settings below for favoriting:

In the Retweet section, you can set up a reply to tweets based on keywords. So, if one of your competitor’s customers complain, then you can be the first to Tweet them. Just picture what they would think your customer service is like compared to your competitor.

Now you have several ways to interact with your competitors’ fans almost entirely automated. Keep in mind that you must follow-up with most people who respond to your replies, follows, and favorites. This is part of nurturing your relationships with people, so they’ll turn into customers.

TIME TO DOMINATE

I just explained a few advanced tactics of Twitter automation, but it’s time to take it up several levels. So, let’s say you don’t want to interact with all of a specific influencer’s followers, you just want to interact with their followers with specific keywords in their bio, from specific countries, and have a certain follower ratio. Now you can do that and a whole lote more.

From the first part of the tutorial, plug-in your competitor’s Twitter URLs into the Mass Planner Contact section (you can also use Twitter List URLS). Then, set the scroll rate to 600 - 10,000 seconds depending on the size of the audience you’re exporting.

In this example, I import my own following into Mass Planner. Under Use Members I can see all the imported members.

Now, click on “Export Selected” to put all these people into an Excel file to clean up.

In the Excel file, delete all the columns except the one with the Twitter URL. From here, click “Text to Columns” under Excel’s Data tab. You want to separate the column by the slashes “/” to clean the data.

You’ll now have an entire column of just usernames. Delete all the others columns.

Once you delete the other columns, add an “@” symbol to the front of every username.

You can do this using the Concatenate formula as seen below:

Now, copy the usernames with the @ signs and paste them into a new Excel file using “paste values.”

From here, save your new list of usernames as a CSV file.

Here comes the magic:

In Audience, click on Target in the menu bar, then Text file.

Now, click on Upload a file and select your CSV file.

You’ll now see a comprehensive overview of the users.

Click All members in the top left-hand corner.

Now, I can see all the exported members in Audiense’s discovery tool. Here, I can reduce the audience to a specific group of people based on many different demographics. In this example, I include the word “founder” in the bio. As a result, I see I only have 194 followers who have the word “founder” in their bio. Now, I can click All Criteria → Export XLSX to get a file of these Twitter users.

You want to upload the XLSX file into a Google Sheet.

Create two new columns titled Link and Twitter. For Twitter, plug-in the regular Twitter URL. Under Link, you want to combine the username and Twitter URL. Use the formula “=concat” to combine the columns. To easily fill out the entire column, double click on the bottom left-hand corner of the cell.

Next, you want to copy three of the columns into a new spreadsheet (name, Link, username). They must have these column titles. The last column is called source. You can put anything here. It’s important to do this; otherwise, you can’t upload the data into Mass Planner. Finally, export the new spreadsheet into a CSV file.

Now, you can follow these people using Mass Planner by selecting “Follow people from a provided list.” Next, click “Import” located below this section to select your brand new CSV file of your competitor’s followers with the keyword “founder” in their profile.

Note: If you want to auto mention these select people at scale, then check out this guide:

With the steps I outlined, you can automate interaction with the most specific users on Twitter. Just to give you an idea, I can take HubSpot’s Twitter list of 2015 Inbound Attendees (https://twitter.com/HubSpot/lists/inbound15-tweeters), then segment it down to those still active on Twitter.

I can further dial it down to those who have the phrase “growth marketer” in their bio, are not a company, live in the U.S.,  and have a good Twitter ratio. From here, I can automate following and favoriting them. The power is in your hands. Use it wisely 😉