The Twitter Follow Tool

Introduction

The Follow tool on SU Social is crucial for Twitter because it allows you to target users who are interested in your content without spending too much time manually following large numbers of followers. By automating this process, you can save time and effort, and focus on other growth-enhancing strategies to build your brand and engage with your audience.

Accessing the Twitter Follow tool

The Follow tool can be accessed by going to the TOOLS view, clicking on your account there, and then going directly to the Follow tool Settings tab.

In order to set up your Follow tool, we will go over each of the four tabs in this guide:

• Settings
• Sources
• Extracted Users
• Results

Settings tab

This is the main control center for the tool where you will specify how it behaves and how often will it execute. It features 5 essential sections that give you the freedom to tailor your experience. Among these sections are:

Run Timers

1. This section enables you to specify a delay before the next follow operation is initiated.
2. This allows you to set the number of users to follow on each operation.
3. Here is where you specify the specific time frame for the tool to execute the follow actions.
4. After X-Y operations, you can check this option to add a random sleep time.
5. This option enables you to stop the tool for a period of time after performing a target number of follow actions that you can specify in minutes.
6. You can let the tool know which specific days of the week should it run for.
   The days you chose for the Follow tool to operate can be randomly rearranged each week by choosing the Rotate Days option. For instance, the tool will select a different set of three days for the following week if you chose Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If you don’t want to follow users on weekends, you can also choose to exclude them from the rotation. 

   💡 There is an estimated value of how many follows per hour and per day will be made with your Run Timer settings (3.92 follows/hr and 94 follows/day in the image above). Remember that these are just approximate values only and should be treated as such.

Follow Limits

1. You can do this to set a daily cap for the Follow tool, and when it is reached, it will automatically stop following until the following day. You can also set the daily cap to rise steadily until it reaches your daily target; this feature may be helpful for users who want to warm up their accounts but remember to use this gradually.
2. With this option, you can set an hourly cap; it functions similarly to a daily cap.
3. With this option, you can instruct Su Social to alternate between the Twitter Follow and Unfollow tools in accordance with certain criteria. You need to check the option in both tools, then you start only one of them and Su Social will keep switching between the tool when needed according to your conditions on the option.
4. This lets you specify how long will it scroll on the search page when collecting users to be followed. More scroll time means more users to be extracted but don’t set this too high as you may get timeout errors and Twitter will no longer show search results because of prolonged scroll time.

User Filters

1. User has only English characters in Bio, username – use this option if you want to avoid following users with non-English characters in their profile.
2. User has profile image – use this option to follow users that have a profile image.
3. User has a cover image – use this option to follow users with a cover image in their profile.
4. User has a minimum number of tweets – You can use this filter to follow active users that have a minimum of X tweets in their profile.
5. User has between x and y followers/followings – These two options will help you follow users that have a range of followers/followings.
6. User has a follow ratio (followers/following) greater than / User has a follow ratio (followers/following) smaller than – Following users based on their follow ratio can be achieved by utilizing these 2 filters. This technique proves to be beneficial when aiming to follow active accounts.The follow ratio is calculated by dividing the number of followers an account has by the number of people they follow.  For instance, if Account A has 2000 followers and follows 4000 accounts, the follow ratio would be computed as 2000/4000 = 0.5, resulting in a follow ratio of 0.5 for Account A.
7. User Bio has a minimum of characters – You can use this option to follow only if the user has a minimum of X characters, it’s useful to avoid following bot accounts.
8. User bio/username/name must not contain any invalid words – Use this option to avoid following users with specific words in their bio.
9. User bio/username/name must contain any of the following words – Use this option to follow only users with specific words in their bio.
10. User tweeted or liked within the last X days – This option will help you to follow active users by following users who posted in the last X days.
11. User is not following this account– If a user is already following your account, the tool will avoid following him if this option is checked.
12. Do not follow private users – Use this option to avoid following users whose Twitter profiles are set to private.
13. Skip unsafe profiles – This option will help skip following users that post adult content.
14. Skip profiles with usernames ending in a series of numbers – This option can help skip following users with a username that ends with a series of numbers (example: James0111248).
15. Follow only males/females/both/all – Use this option to follow users by gender. To use this option, you need to set up a list of names in the option Show male/female names option under Settings > Software Settings.

Follow Settings

There’s only one option here, you may choose to follow random users from the extracted list as recorded in the Extracted Users tab (instead of following them in order).

After Follow Actions

1. You may like users’ tweets after following them.
2. You can also mute them after the follow action.
3. There’s an option to send a message after the follow and your message will be queued in the Contact > Send Message > Pending Send Messages List.
4. You may also have Su Social remove the sources that are not up to par with your desired “follow back” ratio.

Sources tab

Reaching users who might be interested in your offerings and increasing the likelihood of conversions depend critically on the sources you choose. 

Follow people by keyword search

Enter the keywords separated by a comma. If you want to extract users immediately, you may click on EXTRACT NOW. You may also use Twitter Advanced Search operators here.

Follow followers of target accounts

Input the Twitter URL format as shown on the sample below (add /following to target a user’s followings instead) then click on ADD ACCOUNT URLS to have them indexed in the table below. Su Social will then extract either the followers or followings of the account you input.

Follow followers of own followers

This is very straightforward, it will go to your followers’ followers list and get users to follow there.

Follow people from a provided list

This is the Twitter equivalent for following specific users. Just enter their Twitter URL and click on Add to Extracted Users.

Follow members from provided Twitter lists

If you have Twitter lists and you want to follow the members of those lists, you may use this source. Follow the format on the sample below.

Follow Active Users

This is for following users who retweeted and users who liked tweets (indicating that they are indeed active users). You may either input a Twitter user URL or a particular tweet URL.

Follow people from a custom URL

With this source, you can input custom Twitter URLs. Some other examples you may use include:

• https://twitter.com/search?q=dogs&src=typed_query&f=live – for fetching the latest tweets about dogs
• https://twitter.com/search?q=pets&src=typed_query – for fetching top tweets about dogs
• https://twitter.com/search?q=cats&src=typed_query&f=user – for fetching people who tweeted about cats

Extracted Users tab

This tab is the preliminary list of users extracted from the source/s you provided. If you chose to Follow people from a provided list, their names would be automatically added here. Su Social will visit these users’ profiles one by one and check if the user filters you selected on the Follow > Settings tab apply to the user. If it passed your filter/s, the user will be followed. If not, you will see here what filter/s did the user fail.

In case a user failed a filter and you want to try following him again after changing your filters, you may click on RESET FILTER for that particular user, or you may choose the RESET ITEMS WITH FAILED FILTERS option above and it will reset for all items with failed filters.

Results tab

The final tab will display the users who have been successfully followed by Su Social.

You’ll find additional information such as:

• The date and time when the user was followed
• Name of that user
• What source was used to follow the user
• Followed Back column will show you if this user followed you back or not
• Unfollowed column will show you if you unfollowed these users through Su Social or not
• Action buttons such as Delete, Browse (open on an external browser), Browse Embedded, or Copy (the user’s URL)

You’ll notice that there’s an option to Import people you’ve followed manually. This is particularly helpful when unfollowing users you’ve followed outside Su Social and will be further discussed in the Unfollow tool article.

Conclusion

The SU Social Follow tool for Twitter is an excellent way to save time and effort on social media. It has several customizable settings that enable you to personalize your experience. Whether you’re looking to follow big accounts in your niche or target users with specific interests, the SU Social Follow tool can help you build your online presence and engage with your target audience.