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It is no secret that we here at The Social Ms have a strong Twitter presence. We use the follow-unfollow strategy to grow our Twitter accounts. We use some Twitter tools to help us do this. We mainly use ManageFlitter. But for some accounts we also use Tweepi, because I rather like the follow options and how accounts I potentially want to follow are listed.

That was until today. Today I decided never again to use Tweepi because they got me two accounts locked.

Here is what happened: A few days ago Tweepi went down „for maintenance“. A while later they tweeted they were working on restoring the follow function and which should be fixed 48 hours. Obviously, they had to resolve some issues they had with Twitter.

So far so good. We have been running an online publishing platform. I know that sometimes there are errors and you need time to solve the problem – especially if you need to work it out with another company like Twitter. I would have waited for quite a while before turning away from Tweepi.

But they made a fatal error. They seemingly restored their follow function, letting me (and hundreds or even thousands of other Tweepi users) run blindly into a trap: It looked like Tweepi was working again, so I tried to follow a handful of accounts from one of our smaller accounts and a second later the account was locked.

The problem was not limited to this account. You only need to search Twitter for “tweepi” and will find tons of discussions between angry Tweepi users who got their accounts locked for using a functionality Tweepi seemed to have fixed.

Tweepi obviously also had to remove other functionality, which I did not use anyway:

So from today on I strongly recommend NOT to use Tweepi, because they let their users run blindly into a trap risking their Twitter accounts. 

And that was not all: I was using the free Tweepi account. But several Tweepi users complained on Twitter, that even for their paid accounts Tweepi billed their credit card while at the same time their accounts including some client accounts were locked by Twitter for simply using Tweepi. That is simply not very user friendly behavior.

So what is the alternative?

We have told you about ManageFlitter before.

We turned from Tweepi to ManageFlitter for our large accounts a while back, as Tweepi had some trouble handling the bigger accounts a while back. And we were instantly impressed as ManageFlitter had some features which at that time Tweepi was totally lacking.

Even today after the “New Tweepi” was released a year ago the options you have with ManageFlitter are very comfortable and ManageFlitter obviously looks more to securing that you do not break any Twitter rules. We never had any trouble with using ManageFlitter.

The free version of ManageFlitter only offers unfollow options. But the paid version offers you the ManageFlitter PowerMode with tons of options to avoid the behavior that makes Twitter angry and which make your follow-unfollow activity a lot more efficient:

• You can choose only to follow people you have never followed before
• You can choose how many days you want to follow people before you unfollow them again if they did not follow you back. This period should be at least a week as Twitter does not like people who quickly follow and unfollow the same people.

Do you want to learn more about using Twitter to build your social audience? Learn how to grow your Twitter account like a pro!

There are a couple of more options the PowerMode offers. Here are some examples:

• never follow potentially spammy accounts
• only follow accounts who tweet in the language you tweet yourself
• follow only active accounts
• unfollow inactive accounts
• unfollow spammy accounts
• choose account within a range of followers (I use this to follow rather small accounts as accounts with huge follower numbers usually do not follow back or respond)

As said before, the follow functions of ManageFlitter including the ManageFlitter PowerMode is not for free. But comparing the pricing when you are running more than one Twitter account, you may even come cheaper with ManageFlitter than with Tweepi where a Platinum account comes at 14,99$/month per account. ManageFlitter offers an account for 5 Twitter accounts for 24,99$. See more on ManageFlitter pricing here.

I am not sure how Tweepi will come out of this whole affair. Tweepi was the first Twitter tool we used and it was part of our success story for a long time. It’s kind of sad to see it struggle in this way. But we cannot risk getting more accounts locked. So we had to say goodbye to Tweepi.

Already many Twitter users are turning from Tweepi to ManageFlitter. You too? And in case you are looking for other Twitter automation tools, check out this list.

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