It's possible to automate your tweets. For example, you can send the same tweet to Facebook and Twitter with one click! Unfortunately, these tend to show up twice on Twitter, and your efforts to save yourself time while broadcasting to as many people as possible start to look like just that: broadcasting - with little or no intent to foster two-way communication. This is just old-school advertising disguised as hip and now social networking.

How do you feel about these? I guess if I thought what was supposedly being given away was something I would sell my own retweeting soul for, I might not have a problem with it. But, hey, I would love an iPhone. What are your chances of really winning, though? No matter. This person is willing to shove a mercenary tweet at me because they don't really care what I think at the moment.

Probably what happens next on my end is the tit for tat calculus. Does this person RT me? Do I even know this person? Do I want to know them? They are not creating a favorable impression with this tweet. "A check on the negative side of the ledger for you," as Scrooge McDuck would say.

When you tweet the same thing from two different accounts, don't expect people to get much of a charge out of following both. I will probably be unfollowing one or the other of these, RobertatGist or Gist, soon.

One possible way to avoid this: Use a Twitter client that allows you to post automatically at different times, so that the two accounts aren't tweeting the same thing simultaneously.

If you're new to Twitter, you get a few of these gratis. Probably almost everyone does it once or twice.

To get a sense of the absurdity, though, consider what you would think if http://twitter.com/BARACKOBAMA or http://twitter.com/TheJointStaff or (for social media aficionados) http://twitter.com/jowyang were to post a tweet like this. What would they be thinking?

Yeah, I've got my finger on the red button. I could press this! Oh wait, I think I'll tweet "This is so cool." Yeah. That would be awesome.

How do you feel about this? Personally, I think that if you have to retweet someone's tweet about you, it sounds like you're suffering from a bit of an insecurity complex. If you're a lone blogger trying to get some RT love, that's probably forgivable. But what if you are a search engine ostensibly backed by millions of Redmond marketing dollars?

Looking at the tweetstream for "bing randfish" we can see that @randfish tweeted about it himself, and plenty of others followed suit. @bing can keep a high profile by staying out of the RT exchange. Why not use your RT love to let others know about someone or something you think deserves some credit - other than yourself? That way, they will probably be more inclined to return the favor the next time you score a big visibility opp with one of the biggest names in SEO.

This is a pretty minor How Not To - but still worth noting. Here is an example of a generic, probably autogenerated, "Thanks for following". If it weren't autogenerated, the sender could easily have included a salutation, like "Hey Mark!"

Ipso facto and e pluribus unum, I don't think this person is really "looking forward to" my posts, because he hasn't even looked to see who is following him. The autogenerator is looking forward to my posts. Isn't that special?

So, this message seems stale, even fake. And fake is not good if what you want is to be a trust agent.

What do you think?

You will probably annoy your followers if you tweet the same message about your own blog post more than once or twice.

This does seem too simple. Where's the catch? Call Chris Anderson...