[Air-L] tweetadder - any experiences or thoughts?

[Monica Barratt]

Hi AoIR :)

I am part of an international collaboration of researchers studying
cannabis cultivation, especially among small-scale growers. I have an
extensive plan for recruiting cannabis growers. One of the methods is
through in-person and online engagement with user groups - so far I've
been working with one user group who, after a fairly suspicious start,
has agreed to support the research and is even piloting the
questionnaire for us. One of my other methods is through a Twitter
account I've just started @Wor1dWideWeed

My question for the group is whether any of you have:
1. used twitter successfully to recruit participants to research,
especially participants in hidden populations
2. if yes, have you used Twitter marketing and automation programs
like tweetadder to assist the process?

I've been looking into tweetadder - see http://www.tweetadder.com/ -
because it allows fine-grained automation of many of the tasks which
take time on Twitter, especially sourcing new people to follow to whom
you are relevant and have a fair chance of following you back. I can
see that automating everything just makes you into an annoying Twitter
bot... but automating some tasks while still spending a little time
actually reading your feed and manually interacting and curating your
content, could really assist the process, grow your follower base, and
likely result in more relevant people being aware of and participating
in the study.

On another note, I saw on the tweetadder forums that some people were
having their accounts suspended for using tweetadder. Can anyone tell
me more about why this is as I'm a bit confused as to whether
tweetadder is actually even legal according to Twitter tos?

Really interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!

Monica

Monica Barratt
Research Fellow
National Drug Research Institute
http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/staff/staff.asp?persid=650
@monicabarratt