I set up the automated DM now and have gained about 45 new newsletter signups in one week. Lots of positive DM's back. No complaints. Just sold 2 cd's to one of them = 40$. 

Just thought I would share these results with you.

Best

Soren

Thanks for sharing this.

We're not ready to use it yet, but I shared it with a friend who has tried it to increase sign ups for her blog. It has worked like a dream, so I guess it's definitely worth trying as a way of driving free traffic (well, free unless you pay for the DM service) to a squeeze page.

Deb 

Okay, I finally just joined social oomph because it's not expensive and followbackr was suspended by Twitter. And it's $6 a month for five accounts, so I can use it for personal, podcast, band, and my drummer can use it as well. So, I was just being cheap. But when you're running a business every penny counts I guess, that $6 is an extra CD you have to sell every month at a show.

So, the results? 

I started using Tweepi the second week of February following about 100-150 people a day who follow paranormal podcasts (that's what I'm promoting right now, we do an hour long podcast with a new song every week and we're releasing EPs of fully produced versions of three of those songs every 3 months - going in the studio tomorrow to finish up the latest batch.) Then the third week of February I joined socialoomph and started auto-DMing people with links to the podcast, I'm also posting several articles a day on Twitter and usually one on Facebook using snip.ly, which lets you put a call to action (to go to your website) for any article that you share. 

So, in the past month, I've gone from 900 followers at the beginning of February to 2436 today, so that's a massive improvement. I'm following around 2000 people though, so my Twitter feed is nigh illegible, so you really have to depend on friends lists if you still want to use it for the fun/social aspect of it. 

I've been pushing downloads of the podcast and iTunes subscriptions instead of email subscriptions and we've seen growth from 5 downloads a day (with a high of 50-some when we were featured as an iTunes New and Noteworthy podcast) to regularly 50 to 80 downloads a day since starting the strategy and it's only about ten minutes of effort (I spent twice as much time writing this post than I did following and unfollowing people on Twitter today.)

I've also had some sales on iTunes as a result of people hearing songs on the podcast. Anyway, Twitter is a great strategy that I was always afraid of because I didn't want to be one of those auto-DM people. But here's the thing, the only people that care are other marketers on social media. I'm only following people who already like similar things to what I'm offering and when they DM me, I look at their profile, DM them back something relevant, and start a conversation. That's exactly what Twitter is for (not just for jokes and celebrity rants) so I'm not being annoying. Plus, it's my personal account that I've been using since 2007 so I'm real on there (I talk about beer, concerts, tweet at my friends, etc...) 

I'm bringing my drummer in on it. I'm excited to go through the new sales funnel lesson because we need one for the podcast and we're revamping the one for our band with the new release. Either, Twitter was great. I wanted to experiment for a month and see if it helped downloads and it has. I'm going to add it to my music squeeze page strategy for our new release in two weeks.

Can you personalize your auto-DMs?

I use ManageFlitter to unfollow people who don't follow me back, which let's me follow more people in turn. I personally message them all so that I can put their name in the message, like "Hi Pete...". It works really well that way too and if you just copy-paste the DM from a Word or OpenOffice document it doesn't take that long. Auto-DMs would still appeal though, as then I'd have to spend almost no time sending the initial message.

Hi Tam!

I would think that personalizing is very important. I'll probably just stick to sending the DMs myself. It doesn't take too long if you just copy-paste the main message and put in the name for each DM.

ManageFlitter does have a batch select option in the paid version. I haven't used it though, as I only recently upgraded from the free version.