At SocialToo, it has always been my goal to make following the people you want to follow as seamless an effort as possible. In my own opinion, you should not have to do anything to have us follow those that follow you, send automatic reply dms on your behalf, etc. However, there are some which want their replies and follows to be much more immediate. With the recent Twitter API limits, this simply isn’t possible to enable immediate follows and replies, and still do everything with no effort on your behalf (at least currently), so today, we’re providing another option for you.
Starting now, you can start forwarding your new follow e-mails from Twitter to the address, “autofollow@socialtoo.com”, and for every e-mail we receive, we’ll auto-follow that individual in the e-mail for you. In addition, if you have auto-dms enabled in your Admin preferences for Twitter, we will also send them the auto dm you specified in your preferences. So all you need to do to get immediate follows is set up an automatic rule in your e-mail client to forward those e-mails to us, and we’ll do the following for you. Note that you must have an account with SocialToo, and must have provided at least your Twitter username and password for it to work.
We’re providing this service as a convenience to you, and also as an easy way for those of you already using other services that provide this feature to easily transfer to SocialToo. If you use a competing service, simply change the e-mail address for that competing service’s auto follow e-mail filters to “autofollow@socialtoo.com”, and, assuming you already have an account with us, SocialToo will automatically start following those that follow you immediately. This does not affect your auto unfollow settings – you must set those up separately in your Admin preferences.
At the same time, if you don’t want to do anything, your automatic follow will still work on your behalf, no e-mail forwards needed on your part. This is just a way to make your auto-follows and replies a little more instantaneous. Interestingly, we did notice that, assuming we were able to run our auto follow scripts faster, our scripts detect your new follows even faster than Twitter can send out new follow e-mails for. Unfortunately we aren’t able to run them fast enough, yet, which is why we’re providing this service. Now you have just one more way to follow those who follow you, even more immediately than before.
I’ve been told this doesn’t work on AOL mail or Hotmail, but here is how you can set up an e-mail forward on Gmail:
1. Click on “Create Filter” to the right of the search box at the top
2. In the “From” field, enter “twitter.com”
3. In the “Subject” field, enter “is now following you on Twitter”
4. Click “Next Step”
5. On the following page, make sure “Skip the Inbox”, “Mark as read”, “Forward it to”, and “Never send it to Spam” are all checked.
6. In the “forward it to” box (it should be checked), enter, “autofollow@socialtoo.com” (without the quotes)
7. Click “Create Filter”
8. You’re Done! We’ll start auto following those that follow you immediately after we get your e-mail. Or, if you turn this filter off, we’ll continue to do it in the background on a slower, more paced, basis.
As always, if you see any problems with the service don’t hesitate to contact me, personally, at contact@socialtoo.com.