This tool helped me to boost my Twitter presence by 1412%

This CrowdFire review discusses whether CrowdFire is a worthwhile tool to help build your social media following. I also demonstrate exactly how it’s helped me boost my Twitter presence for this very website!

First of all, I have to admit, that I don’t use free version, but Premium version, which costs 37.48$ per month. But it really worth it! You can check all the versions here.

Some kind of social media following is a must for the majority of new businesses. However, getting things moving beyond the starting blocks (and beyond a handful of followers who are mostly family and friends), can feel like an uphill struggle.

CrowdFire came to my attention when I was looking for a way to build up the BriefNews.eu Twitter account. I’ve been using it myself now for several months, and I’m really happy with the results. I’m therefore pleased to finally get around to sharing them with you. So let’s get started.

IMPORTANT UPDATE 4th Feburary 2019: Twitter has suspended CrowdFire’s API access, which has stopped many of the service’s most useful features from working. This is an ongoing situation, discussed in detail here. Regrettably, I’d have to say to proceed with caution until this situation is resolved.

What is CrowdFire?

CrowdFire is a web-based utility that “plumbs in” to your social media accounts. Originally designed as a Twitter tool, it now also has functionality for Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. CrowdFire helps you automate the repetitive tasks involved in steadily growing a following on social media.

For example, when I first set up the Twitter account for this site, I would spend time daily identifying people in the home working and freelancing niches, and follow them in the hope they would follow me back and interact with me in the future. CrowdFire helps you find these people and makes it really quick to add them. Even more usefully, it helps you keep track of those who don’t follow you back or those who are inactive and not worth following, so you can keep the list of people you follow in check.

It does plenty more besides; It finds relevant content you can share to help you keep your accounts alive and busy, suggests tweaks to your accounts to help them perform better, and does it all with a very modern “bot” style interface that only takes a couple of minutes each day to manage.

In case you’re not already starting to guess, I’m quite a fan of CrowdFire – and you probably will be too. Especially when I tell you the best part of all: subject to some functionality limitations, it’s possible to get started with it for free.

CrowdFire Pricing

As I just said, CrowdFire is available completely free, subject to some limitations, but there are some premium options available too.

It’s possible to try out what CrowdFire has to offer without spending any money at all, but as you can see from the above, you’re limited to one account per social network. You’re also restricted in terms of how many people you can follow / unfollow each day, and in how much suggested content you’re given to share.

I used the free version of CrowdFire for several weeks, in tandem with doing some manual following. After this time I was very much convinced it was well worth spending five bucks a month for the time I’d save by doing everything with CrowdFire. I like the fact you can genuinely “try before you buy.”

Furthermore, for people managing loads of social media accounts (perhaps with a business specialising in this kind of work), the Premium and VIP options (at $7.99 per month and $33.32 per month respectively) are great value.

How does CrowdFire work?

After granting CrowdFire permission to manage your desired social media accounts (I primarily use it for Twitter), all you really need to do is access the service once per day and follow the instructions it gives you.

For example, on a typical day, it will give me a selection of relevant content to choose from to share on my timeline. Then it will suggest some accounts for me to unfollow because they’ve not reciprocated in following me. Next, I’ll get a list of suggested new accounts to follow because they’re fans of similar people in my niches, or because they’ve been tweeting about relevant keywords.

On some days, I’ll get additional tasks, such as feeding in more relevant keywords, checking my automatic message to people who follow me, or checking that the information in my “About” section remains relevant. One feature I particularly like is that if the system notices I keep ignoring a task, it will give me the option of suspending it so it doesn’t bother me with it for a while.

Everything’s done with a very friendly interface, and it all literally only takes a couple of minutes a day to manage.

CrowdFire Results

What CrowdFire essentially does for me is almost completely automate a task that was previously taking 20 minutes a day (and often not getting done due to other pressures). But I can always grab two minutes each day to do it.

Most importantly, my follower count on Twitter continues to rise at a good rate, and rises with relevant followers, thanks to the fact they’re people I already know are interested in freelancing and homeworking.

Recently, I decided to start tracking my number of Twitter followers, as well as the number of people I am following. (Keeping this ratio in line is important if you want to keep the “Twitter police” happy with you!)

I’ve screenshotted my own progress below. (Note that these aren’t all consecutive days, but days that all follow the completion of one of CrowdFire’s recommended “prescriptions.”)

The first number for each day is the number of people I’m following; The second is my number of followers.

As you can see, 30 days of using CrowdFire boosted my follower count by 533. I’m following 801 more people now, but that number would be vastly higher if I didn’t have the ability to unfollow people who aren’t engaging with me.

It’s also important to reemphasize that my followers are decent, relevant followers, who are interested in the kind of stuff Brief News tweets about. They are followers who interact with my posts, like them, retweet them, and click through to the website. This is incredibly important, as there’s no point having a big follower number for vanity if none of those people ever look at your content.

The numbers above prove that I can carry on doing what I’m doing and steadily increase my Twitter following (at least until I’m following 5000 people, when things get a little more difficult). As you can see below, I’ve recently tipped over the 2000 mark!

These numbers alone make CrowdFire worth every penny. And it’s possible to do all this with the free version too – albeit at a dramatically slower pace, due to the follow / unfollow limits imposed.

CrowdFire Downsides

When I sat down to write this, I knew I’d struggle with downsides, and having reached this point in typing it up, that struggle remains!

One recent change that’s bugged me is that you used to be able to bang down repeatedly on the mouse button to follow or unfollow people en masse. CrowdFire recently changed so that you now have to scroll down and click each green “plus” icon in turn (as shown in the screenshot below).

This is actually a good thing, because it ensures you at least glance at who you’re following. It stops you being lazy and treating the whole thing as an automated exercise. But it has made everything take a tiny bit longer.

But I must be honest – this is a tiny criticism, and I can’t think of anything else to moan about. CrowdFire is one of those tools that’s really easy to recommend.

CrowdFire Review: Conclusion

So that brings us to the end of this (rather positive) review.

Using CrowdFire is a bit of a “no brainer” if you’re keen to build up your social media profile. It essentially helps you do the kind of things a social media agency would charge you for, but for free or at a very low cost, all in a couple of minutes per day.

It definitely pays dividends to pay attention to who you’re following, and it’s obviously crucial that you provide your followers with valuable content if you’re going to keep them interested. Using CrowdFire doesn’t do everything for you!

But if you’ve got the right intentions for your social media, CrowdFire is a really great way to speed along the progress, rather than waiting for your following to grow slowly and organically.

If your businesses uses social media (and it should!) then you should use CrowdFire. You’ll find it here.