Hummingbird2 or TweetAdder – Which is best?

Recently I have been asked several times “Which Twitter Automation solution is better, Hummingbird2 or TweetAdder?”

And as usual, the answer is… it depends

This is especially true now that Hummingbird2 is as much a Twitter “client” solution as it is an automated follow and unfollow solution.

For the reasons I like TweetAdder, and some of its unique capabilities go to this post and review what I had to say there.

The basics remain the same although TweetAdder did have a nice enhancement release since that post.  However, the core strengths and “differences” are mostly the same as before.

Ok, I have bounced around enough.

The reasons I like Hummingbird2 over TweetAdder:

• Hummingbird2 allows you to be especially careful about who you follow which ultimately provides you with a much higher quality list
• It is fully automated.  Once you provide it with the proper keywords to search for within the twitterverse, it just plods away and finds followers that meet your keyword and quality filter settings on full automatic.
• It automatically unfollows ONLY when it needs to do so in order to follow more people.  And it does this on a one at a time basis.  No way Twitter can come back and ban your account for unfollow purges!
• It is a pretty cool multi-account client for communicating with Tweeps

The reasons I like TweetAdder over Hummingbird2:

• TweetAdder allows you to build followings faster than Hummingbird2.  It has no way to be “selective” on which followers you follow.  So you cannot tell TweetAdder NOT to follow people that have no followers, or who are using the default avatar, or any number of other indicators of either really new tweeps or spam twitter accounts.  But if you goal is to build a big list fast, TweetAdder is by far more productive
• It allows you to use a variety of methods to determine which list of people to follow, not just a keyword search of the recent updates posted to twitter.
• You have complete control over unfollows.  So you can manually or automatically reduce your following list to keep it to the ratio you prefer.  With Hummingbird2, if it finds lots of people to follow using your keywords and filters, there is no good way to unfollow people that you have followed after 3-4 days so you can make room for more follows in mass.  Hummingbird2’s documentation even suggests you turn off the follow engine for a period of time to give your new following tweeps a chance to follow you back prior to the unfollow engine dropping them.
• TweetAdder has some automated “Update” posting capabilities that, when used properly, are very useful and powerful.
• I really like it’s new DM delete function.  If you are aggressively follow tweeps, you are going to get buried in DM spam so it is really nice to have an easy way to get rid of it (DM Whacker is a free tool that allows you to get rid of DM spam too)

Whew, that is a lot of talking

The short answer is:

• If you want to build a massive list fast and are not as concerned about the quality of this list, TweetAdder is the hands down winner of the tools I have personally reviewed
• If you are into a highly qualified list of tweeps that meet very specific criteria, then Hummingbird2 is your tool of choice!

There, I did it in a very small space

PLEASE… comment on this post.  I am very interested in hearing your thoughts

@TweetTex