Advanced Twitter App for Those Who Want To Tweet Like Marketing Work Horses

Aggie Villaneuva is always generous with her time. The other day she answered one of my questions about the pro plan she has with SocialOoomph.com. I was curious why she would pay for a service to mange her Twitter account when that same service does a very fine job for me at its freebie level. I got such a fully thought-out answer (and convincing!), I thought I'd ask her to share it with my subscribers.


By Aggie Villaneuva


Marketing is as vital to writers as writing the book, but it can't take over our work days. For this reason, most of the professionals I know use at least the free version of SocialOomph. Originally it was called TweetLater because it was an advanced aggregate program for twitter only. They have long since evolved into a cockpit for posting and managing all your social media and more.

With the free version you can schedule your tweets, save and reuse tweet drafts for later use, set up automatic direct messages. You can even extend your twitter profile so that the one link you’re allowed in twitter profile leads to a whole page with photos, text, html, links and more.

You can also use their dld.bz URL shortening to track your clicks and get all kinds of useful and insightful statistics, auto follow/unfollow, vet new followers, view @mentions & retweets and much more.

There are a number of free aggregate type programs that do nearly as much as SocialOomph, (not all) but not nearly as seamlessly. And because I’m serious about the necessity of marketing, I upgraded to the professional version as soon as they offered it.

Here's what I get with those Additional Features in the Professional Upgrade for $29.97/mo:

(Note: Don’t bother with what follows unless you are serious about your social media marketing)

Ping.fm Integration

This alone changes our social media marketing life. Ping.fm is my core social media aggregate or program that composites them all from a central service, but Ping only brings all my social media sites together, it offers none of the advances functions.

SocialOomph integrates seamlessly with Ping so that every tweet scheduled to post shows up in each and every social site I’ve already added to our Ping account, which is dozens. Some other aggregates besides SocialOomph offer Ping integration also, but I have found few, if any, that do everything else the Professional upgrade to SocialOomph does, and certainly not as inexpensively.

Recurring updates

This, and Ping integration, are the main features for which I upgraded to Professional. I have dozens of these recurring updates: each holds up to 100 posts. Some of my recurring updates are for general writing tips, some for general photography tips, a separate one for each of my promotional clients’ launches, social media education, contests, news about Visual Arts Junction, news about Promotion á la Carte and Buzz Club, etc. (Editor's Note: See the biograpy for valuable links to these resources.)

Each of these updates are randomly posted, one every few days. You can schedule the recurrences as often as you wish. I include so many different posts there are seldom repeats, unless I purposely want something to repeat. This keeps me out of trouble with twitter about repeating tweets.

I add to the informational posts almost daily. When I do that, I set the exact time of day, how many times I want it to cycle. I can also pause it if I want to reuse it later. You can also save tweets as drafts to save tons of time never having to retype your posts.

Using this function I can offer posts that teach literally books worth of information to friends and followers. Just last month a man on Facebook wrote to tell me how much he’d learned from the info I post, and proclaimed himself a life-long follower. I often receive thank yous from followers for all the free education I provide.

I could go without writing one new tweet for four months and still be posting five to ten important and time-sensitive tweets per day that seldom repeated. Of course I sprinkle in recurring updates that talk about my own books, photography and promotion business. But you can see the value and power of this function, especially when you link it with your Ping.fm account.

Drip Feed to Your Social Accounts

Visualize a reservoir (or several) each holding all your posts about a certain time-sensitive subject. You want these to drip feed one by one to the social accounts you choose, or all of them, at times you specify. They don’t recur, as with the recurring updates above. Once the reservoir is empty the tweets stop.

Facebook Features for Your Profile and/or (formerly Fan) Pages

Sometimes you need to schedule status updates differently for Facebook or Facebook Pages than for twitter. There are several functions available. You can schedule to post to your social network Profile or your Pages, one of your Pages or all plus your Profiles. This is a great function as it gives such flexible choices.

When you combine this feature with the Ping integration that posts to all your dozens of sites including LinkedIn you can say goodbye to all your other apps. Don't worry about forgetting to apply those site-hash tags and ending up with duplicate after duplicate on your various social media. SocialOomph takes care of the fuss all from one dashboard.

Schedule & Publish Blog Post & Pages

This is a powerful feature. Add your own blog’s posts right from the dashboard, and add unlimited number of blogs. As long as your blog has one of the following remote publishing APIs, you can schedule posts for it: Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress API (wordpress.com and self-hosted), metaWeblogAPI, Movable Type API, Blogger API, and Atom API.

Find Friends in Your Niche & Auto Add to twitter Lists

What I like here is that the Friend Finder is about quality not quantity. Keyword searches are great for following friends whose interests are the same as yours. Attach certain keywords to one of your twitter lists and when you follow one of the those tweeters they will automatically be added to that list. These reports can be filtered to several criteria, such as following-to-follower ratio, and ignoring tweeter profiles that contain certain words.

You may also apply the decisions of other tweeters by ignoring all accounts flagged as spam or that have been blocked by fellow SocialOomph users. The report is sent to you with all these parameters applied. You just decide which of the hand-picked friends you want to add to your twitter list.

Define Channels

Choose a list of favorite friends, or those in the same business, and create your own twitter channel. It's like your own tweet timeline, except a channel contains only the tweets from those users that you include in the channel. You can define an unlimited number of channels. You don't even have to follow someone to include that person in a channel.

Followers With Clout

This is a good tool for business, but not just to list those most important. Do you know which of your followers have the largest reach in terms of the number of people who follow them? That is exactly what the follower clout list tells you. It shows you the fifty most influential people who are following you, judged by the number of people who are following them. They are already following you, so they will probably appreciate it if you reached out to build a better relationship with them.

Direct Message Broadcast

You can send and schedule a direct message to every one of your followers, but only your StatusNet followers. I listed this because I’m hoping that soon SocialOomph will include this for our twitter followers too.

And Much More, Such As…

Manage direct messages with auto spam control you define yourself, forward DMs to others, manage all your accounts in TweetCockpit, which has numerous controls, mute annoying tweeters (this avoids reporting them or blocking and putting their account in danger of cancellation by Twitter, delegateing account management to your assistant, scheduling replies and DMs to their own time zones, bulk uploading your posts, Syncing friends and followers list, wipeing your friends list and start anew, and running your own bots. And I still haven’t listed all the functions.

I’ve seen most of SocialOomp’s functions offered elsewhere but always in separate programs. Who wants to log in to a dozen programs daily when you can log in to one? SocialOomph is the only site to shave your marketing time so dramatically by giving all this to you in one place.

I hate automation for automation’s sake, or the sake of quantity vs. quality. But this is automation that doesn't seem automated. When I am offered a means to communicate to my social media friends on a very personal level within seamless automation, I’m a fan.

Seriously, if you’re serious about you’re writing business, at least check out SocialOomph Professional upgrade.


Please be advised that I so highly recommend this program I have become an affiliate of SocialOoomph, but this is by no means why I recommend it. I recommend it because I know it can save time and help authors market better.


Guest Blogger's Biography
Aggie Villanueva is bestselling author, author publicist, blogger, and critically acclaimed photographic artist represented by galleries nationwide, including Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. She was a published author at Thomas Nelson before she was 30, and founded local the Mid-America Fellowship of Christian Writers three–day conference. Aggie founded Visual Arts Junction blog February 2009 and by the end of the same year it was voted #5 at Preditors & Editors in the category “Writers’ Resource, Information & News Source” for 2009. To further help authors she launched the VAJ Buzz Club – a club where members combine their individual marketing power to create the ultimate BUZZ. Authors clamored for the options to purchase additional promotional services á la carte (as needed) so Aggie added Promotion á la Carte . Contact Villanueva at myaggie2@gmail.com.

Because so many new authors and tweeters seem confused by Twitter, I tried to keep my book Frugal and Focused Tweeting simple. So, advanced information like this isn't in that book. If you are ready for this kind automation, please print this post by Aggie and put a copy in the book. Hey! Even if you're not ready for it, you may be glad you have c copy tucked away in your book when the time comes!

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog: