For better or worse, automation is a big thing in the Twitter world. Auto tweeting your latest blog post. Auto following people. The God-save-us-all auto Direct Message.

Automating can be a time saver. But it also be kicking you in the arse.

Here are some of the biggest offenders and how to fix them.

Tweeting Old Posts

Tweet Old Posts is a WordPress plug-in that automatically tweets out old posts in order to give you a boost in traffic. You set the time interval so it doesn’t pull posts from, say, 2006. You can even exclude categories, which is brilliant, right? Yes, it is… except when you don’t use it properly.

Without excluding certain categories, you could end up with tweets like this:

From the archives: Really cool product review and giveaway that ended two months ago! http://bit.ly/irrelevantlink

An oldie: The must-have gift for Christmas 2010! http://bit.ly/thatsolastyear

Old but still good: Can you believe it? I’m pregnant! http://bit.ly/babyfivemonthsoldnow

Um, yeah. That really doesn’t do anything to boost your traffic in a positive way, does it?

The Fix: Exclude some categories! Then monitor your tweets regularly to make sure you didn’t miss anything. If most of your blog posts fall in the “uncategorized” category, you may just wanna skip automating your old tweets until you find tons-o-hours to go back and sort your posts. Just sayin’.

Following People Back

I love when I see this in people’s profiles: “Follow me! I follow back!!!!”

First, it sounds like you’re SO desperate for followers that you’ll follow anyone, even rhonda3569684 who just posts links to unsavory websites we won’t mention or tells you that you won an iPad. Second, if you’re automating this follow back, it’s a double smack in the face. Why?

It’s NOT about your numbers. Let me repeat.

It’s NOT about your numbers.

Plus, if you care anything about measured influence scores like Klout (I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t because those are just numbers too) then following bots can actually hurt your score. If you want to read an entire post about why you shouldn’t follow everyone back, you should read this one from a site I just discovered but already love called Flowtown.

The fix: Don’t go rogue with loads of irrelevant followers. Instead, follow people back that you genuinely find interesting or at least find intriguing enough to give a chance. Worry about genuine connections with people instead racing to your next follower milestone. Sure it takes a little time to do it manually, but do you really want to be following a bunch of spammers or shady multi-level marketers? Skip the automation altogether.

Keyword-Based Retweeting

Let’s say Sally tweets a lot about hiking. She sets her account up to automatically retweet any tweet that has the word hiking in it.

“Wow- it’s so auto-magical! I don’t have to click a thing and my readers think I’m the best curator of content EVAH!” she tells you.

Well, sure some of the posts are relevant. But then some are tweets like, “Stop the government from hiking up our taxes! http://bit.ly/notnature” or “Guess who’s hiking up her jeggings! http://bit.ly/realtweet”

The fix: Just don’t do it. Instead, set up a Twitter search for a relevant keyword and keep it in another tab in your browser. Or better yet, use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and just add a column. Then if you see a post worth retweeting, go for it!

Follower-Based Retweeting

Unlike keyword-based retweeting, when I say follower-based retweeting I mean that you actually know the person whose content you’re retweeting. You may not be exchanging holiday gifts or anything but you trust the content this person tweets and you want to share the love. In the blogging world, for example, some people will automatically retweet tweets with links from @problogger, @copyblogger and other big names.

There’s been lots of buzz lately about a thing called Triberr, which they describe like this: “Your blog post is imported and automagically retweeted by your tribe.” So, I could be in a circle of bloggers and anytime they updated their blog post, I’d automatically retweet it. I find it partly ingenious and partly dangerous.

It can go rogue if you cast too wide a net of people and aren’t completely sure about everything they post about. Say you’re a hard-core vegetarian and someone in your tribe does a blog post about an Omaha Steaks giveway. Oops! While your followers will most likely forgive you, it still kinda sucks.

The Fix: Keep a very tight circle of those you automatically retweet. If you use Triberr, you can change a setting so that you can view the tweets before they are sent out. May make sense to do for a while until you’re 100% confident in your tribe (or you can keep doing it for that matter).

As a side note, I found this incredible post from Blogging Bookshelf called Is Auto Tweeting as Bad as Auto Blogging? There are some awesome conversations going on in the comments about Triberr.

Using Paper.li

When I first saw a paper.li paper, it was because I was featured in one. Woohoo- I’m famous!

After feeling famous for a few seconds, I realized that it’s automatically generated and then sent to your followers on a regularly scheduled interval. It basically turns your Twitter timeline into a newspaper. You can build your paper from a certain hashtag, a list of followers and more. For the most part, I find it’s a pretty cool idea.

If you’ve never seen one, here’s one from my friend Fadra:

While I’m always flattered to be linked on one, it can also go horribly, horribly wrong. And it did for me and the poor guy who’s paper I was featured in.

One blogger had created a paper.li for the hiking and outdoors. He had a Twitter list of outdoorsy folks that his paper.li built its content from. While I started out blogging about the outdoors on my blog Adventuroo, I’ve expanded it a lot to include motherhood and other things. Nevertheless, I was on that list. The thing about paper.li is that it will also include retweets of people on those lists too (foreshadowing here, people).

Being that I’m also a marketer, I get serious kicks out of bad pitches. So imagine how hysterical I thought it was that some bloggers were pitched to talk to their moms about vaginal dryness.

Um, yes. You read that right.

But it gets worse. So I retweeted this hysterical post from Motherhood NYC called How to Talk to Your Mother About Her Vagina. It was the one and ONLY time I’ve ever tweeted the word “vagina” and guess what? It showed up in that hiking and outdoors paper.li.

I was soooo embarrassed for me AND for him. I don’t regret tweeting that post but I felt bad that it showed up in his paper.

The Fix: A few things here. First, actually LOOK at your paper.li from time to time. Also, keep a tight group of people you curate content from and revise it regularly. It won’t go wrong often but as you can see, when it does go wrong, it goes so, so, so wrong.

The Big Lesson

The lesson here? Nothing about Twitter automation is ever “set it and forget it.” If you want to use automation to save time, make sure it’s having the intended effect. While one bad tweet won’t kill anyone, it’s important to make sure the automated services you use aren’t continually going rogue. Or you may end up telling your followers about someone’s mom’s you-know-what by accident.

So tell me… any other rogue automation you’ve seen? Have you been burned by bad automation?