Twitter was once only the domain of online geeks and Internet freaks, but it has since exploded onto the scene into being a relevant service for major news outlets, overgrown professional athletes, and freelance writers alike. Everyone from Katy Perry to Barack Obama is on Twitter and there is no denying the potential that a strong Twitter account can have.
To fully harness the power of Twitter, you need followers. Ideally, you want to have a lot of dedicated followers who are actually interested in what you have to say, but getting said followers is easier said than done. This review will take a look at FlashTweet, a “complete Twitter account management solution” that could put you on the fast track to Twitter stardom.
What is FlashTweet?
You’ve probably encountered a variety of other Twitter tools and utilities on the Internet. Each of these may promise you one function or another, but what sets FlashTweet apart is that it is really four tools in one. To give you a quick overview into what this Twitter software can do, take a few minutes to watch their video.
Managing Twitter with Four Fancy Tools
So, as mentioned, FlashTweet is comprised of four different tools that handle slightly different aspects of managing your Twitter account.
After you login to your FlashTweet account, you will be given the opportunity add your Twitter account. You are not restricted to managing a single account either, as it seems like you can add as many accounts as you’d like. You will have to provide FlashTweet with your username and password, however, so anyone with security and privacy concerns should probably look elsewhere.
For the purposes of this review, I added my DotComPho Twitter account to FlashTweet. From there, I gained access to the four icons corresponding to the four different tools. The interface is about as straightforward as it gets, since you just click on one of the huge icons to access that utility.
Follower Management and Mass Following
Although FlashTweet is made up of four tools, the main appeal for marketers and other people who want to build up their followings are the Follower Management tool and the Mass Follow tool. The Schedule Tweets tool can come in handy too, since you can timestamp tweets into the future. The Tweet RSS Feeds tool takes on the same functionality as something like WordTwit and Twitter Tools.
Let’s start with the Follower Management tool.
When you use the Twitter website or you use any of the several different clients available out there, you typically have to follow and unfollow accounts one at a time. With the Follower Management tool, you can follow and unfollow accounts en masse. This tool can display only the accounts that you are following (and not following you back), only the accounts that are following you (and you are not following back), only the accounts with mutual following, or all three of the above.
This is not an automated script, like how you may find through some competing products. You still hit the checkboxes manually, but you can follow and unfollow multiple accounts at a time. I don’t like how there’s only a single-column view, however, since this makes for way too much vertical scrolling. A grid layout would have been much better.
The Mass Follow tool is more interesting. You can use it to view the friends of another Twitter account (like me). This leads back to an interface similar to the Follower Management tool, letting you hand-pick who you would like to follow. The other side lets you search for a keyword and follow the people who are talking about that topic. This can be geotargeted as well.
Both the Mass Follow tool and the Follower Management tool sound handy, but you can easily get overwhelmed when you start to deal with marginally larger numbers. This is also how you can quickly exhaust your API calls and potentially get yourself banned from Twitter (for spam).
Make Money with FlashTweet Too?
FlashTweet will cost you $6.95 a month, but you can try them out for 14 days for free. It’s not in place yet, but you can presumably recoup some of these costs through the upcoming affiliate program.
I can see some of the value that FlashTweet can provide to people who want to better manage their Twitter accounts, but the functionality and layout aren’t on par with some other alternatives. Further still, since “tweet” is in its name, I have a feeling that FlashTweet will soon be hearing from the Twitter lawyers for trademark infringement. We’ve seen it happen to TwitterFollower and TweetLater already, after all.
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