Twitter autoresponders and people that use them have been getting a bit of a bad rep recently. I thought I would just add my thoughts on the subject to why I think otherwise. For those who have not experienced a Twitter autoresponder or don’t know what I’m talking about I mean the automated messages you sometimes get when you start following people.

Before I get showered with inevitable flaming I just want to point out that not all uses for twitter autoresponses is good. One of my favourite search marketing blogs is run by the team at @hubspot and they are clear in pointing out that Twitter is a great inbound marketing tool but it also a permissive medium.

This brings me on to my first gripe, if you DM me just for following and include a link in your message this is not permissive. As with many other twitterites don’t be surprised if I stop following you. If your primary reason for opening a twitter account was to spam followers with marketing bullshit and pushing links on us you will not last long on the twittersphere.

So how can autoresponders be good I hear you ask? Lets start with an example where I got an automated follow response that I actually wanted. See where we are going here, I wanted the response thus making the use of an autoresponder permissive. The example was @sitepointdotcom who were offering a free ebook to new followers.

In a situation such as the SitePoint ebook giveaway an autoresponder is the perfect option. If you’re getting huge numbers of followers you don’t want to be replying to each one of them individually. In this case autoresponders are an extremely productive tool in getting trivial tasks done quickly and without human intervention.

I’m sure some of you are probably shouting from on top of your soapbox that “Twitter shouldn’t be used in this way, providing incentives to follow users, how absurd!” so lets move on to the real point behind this story. How do you make autoresponders work with Twitter that do not upset people but still provide value to those who request it.

The answer to this can be found in the real world equivilent to twitter in the form of mobile phone text messages. You must know what I’m on about, I’m pretty sure you have seen those commercials with “text XYX to 12345″. By sending a short code to a predefined number you receive in turn an automated response. This is used everywhere from requesting ringtones and brochures, to local bus times direct from the bus stop (they have recently introduced this where I live).

This got me thinking about how you can take the same model and apply it to Twitter. This would enable you to set up keyword triggers that could then be used to respond with predetermined responses. This way you can have the convenience of autoresponders without the invasive nature of sending the same message to everyone. It’s what I see as a good example of permissive marketing.

The power in such a tool would not only be useful for autoresponding with predetermined messages, but coupled to a PHP script you could potentially send any information back to a triggered keyword. One thing I would like to be able to do is quickly check my server stats by text message. Yes there are ways and means of putting SMS gateways in place but it’s much easier to text a trigger keyword to Twitter, and as long as I have device updates turned on I will get the information I need straight to my phone.

So where do you find such an application? To be honest I don’t know. I’ve been looking through a number of autoresponder applications for Twitter and I have yet to find one that takes this model and implements it. I’m pretty convinced there could be potential in such an application and I’m more than happy to develop one if there is demand for it.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think there is a market for a keyword triggered autoresponder service for Twitter? Drop me a line using the comments on this post, or even better send me a message on Twitter. You can find me @johnblackmore.

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