photo credit: HVargas

Last spring, Bob Stanke wrote an article about TweetLater on this blog called “Twitter, a time waster? Not with TweetLater!“.  He wrote about the convenience of scheduling tweets and how TweetLater helped with that function.  Since that post, Tweetlater got a new name: SocialOomph.  It has also undergone quite a bit of construction and transformation.  It has become a must have tool for people who are really into Twitter.  I’ll outline some of the features that I think are really valuable.

Auto Follow/Un-follow

This tool simply follows anyone who follows you and un-follows anyone who un-follows you.  There is some logic built into the un-follow to deal with issues where Twitter doesn’t report the proper information back.  Decent feature that works quite well if you wish to follow everyone who follows you.  I’m personally not convinced of using an un-follow tool but that is a personal call.

Vet New Followers

Here’s where the auto-follow really kicks it up a notch.  This allows you to make sure you want to follow the people who follow you.  So instead of just blindly following everyone who follows you (spammers and all), it asks you to confirm that you want to follow them.  Now… here’s the cool part: it’s completely configurable and you can see/confirm the people on one screen instead of having to search for them on Twitter or through some other tool.

First, you configure criteria that will decide the default behavior of the individual follower.  So as an example if the ratio of Followers to Followed is greater than 75% default to follow.  Or… if they don’t have any tweets… default ignore.  The cool part is that it still lets you confirm but it defaults the action so you don’t have to do anything if the configuration is correct, but you can override.

Now, once your configuration is setup… to the vetting screen.  When you click on the vetting screen, it will display everyone who has followed you and is eligible for follow.  On that screen it will display their profile information, recent tweets, stats, which account they followed, and the action (Approve, Ignore, Block, Spam) to be taken.  This will be displayed for groups of 25 at a time.  Once you have set all the actions for that set of 25 simply click the Apply button and the designated action is taken.

This is a great way to filter out some of the spammers that the Auto-Follow simply follows.

Purge DMs

Another cool feature that was added was purge DMs feature.  We all know that DMs are a favorite of spammers.  Also, we receive quite a few legitimate ones that once read really aren’t all that useful.  So what’s the option?  Go through one by one and delete them.  Well, not with Purge DM.  You can set this tool to purge all DMs for a specific timeframe.  Once complete your DM inbox will look a whole lot cleaner.  Pretty cool tool.

Keyword Alerts

Keyword alerts allow you to setup Twitter search criteria and have it send you an email with the results.  Pretty neat tool if you are looking for people to follow.  If you wanted to follow people who were discussing the new Droid phone, simply setup the keyword “Droid” and have it email you the results.  This could come in very handy at times.

Tweet Scheduling

Well, the flagship utility is still there!  You can still tweet later.  There are some added features such as saving message templates.  It also allows you to schedule for multiple accounts.

Premium Services

As with many services on the Internet today, SocialOomph follows the freemium model.  All the options I described above are the free parts.  There are also premium services.  Some of those services are: enhanced tweet scheduling, enhanced filtering of follows, filter for people to follow, define twitter channels, etc.  One other service that has been added is TweetCockpit.  It’s a twitter client that allows you to setup channels, mute certain users, setup filters, and many other available features.  Take a look at the many premium options available.

I’m Oomphed out

So the name change wasn’t the only thing that happened at SocialOomph over the last year.  They have been busy adding features and improving existing features.  It has been expanded to be a sweet suite of social media utilities.  You can find new users to follow, determine whether to follow them or not, schedule what you’re going to tweet to them, and even do some clean up.  It’s a great tool to really put the Oomph in your social media plan.  I hope you enjoy looking into it.