I've been using Social Snip now for about two-ish weeks. I've got to say, I like it. The tools available are very useful, even essential for any social marketer.
Social Snipe has four main tools: the Sniper, Follow Friends, Unfollow and Mass Direct Messenger.
The Mass Direct Messenger is a tool I didn't use much, the Twitter accounts I used to test Social Sniper don't call for much direct messaging. It's a pretty neat feature for those of you that need something like it though. Basically you set up a message, then click 'send'. Everyone on your friends list will get the message, eventually. Because Twitter only allows 250 direct messages a day, Social Snipe will only send out 250 messages a day and will continue to do so every day, until everyone on your list receives the message. You can also keep track of the progress as it sends out the messages too. Pretty handy.
The Friend Follower is a function that allows you to friend the followers of another Twitter account. You enter the Twitter account name, and the number of people you want to follow, click ok, and watch your friends grow. I used this option quite a lot. The way I saw it, if they were interested in following someone doing the same thing as I was, then they should like me just fine. For the most part I was right, but I also got a lot of bots and people trying to sell me crap, but, the people I added as friends using Friend Follower, followed me back.
Twitter has a few hard limits. One of them being you can not friend more then 2000 people, unless there are more then 2000 people following you. It's really important, at least initially, that everyone of your first 2000 friends are follow you back. You want people to interact with you, you want them to click your links or visit your site. If someone you friend doesn't follow you back, they aren't clicking your links or visiting your site, and are taking up a spot for a potential conversion. Social Snipe's Unfollower is a great way to keep this in check. I would use the 'unfollow non-mutual friends' once every 3 days to purge anyone that wasn't following me back, freeing up those spots.
The Sniper is great tool and the soul of Social Snipe. But, you have to use it the right way. It took me a little while to figure out how to use it the right way, and since I have, the Sniper has become my favorite of the tools offered.
The Sniper works off a list of keywords you develop. It will search though tweets, looking for anyone that has mentioned your keywords, then friend them. Initially, I was looking to get people to my news related site, so I used 'CNN' as a keyword. The problem is, for ease of friending large numbers of people quickly, Twitter marketers will friend those huge accounts then spam-friend all of their followers. Most the people I added as friends that tweeted about 'CNN', or retweeted 'CNN' or were friends of CNN, seemed to be marketers themselves. I had very few people follow me back, and was inundated with spam both in tweets and in direct messages.
I realized the key is to use something like the long tail keyword method we use for PPC. The longer and more specific my keywords were, the more likely I would follow a person as opposed to a marketer or bot. So, rather then using 'Iraq+war' as a keyword, I would use something like 'solders+fire+fight+wounded+Iraq'. With this combination I would get people tweeting about the war in some depth, or they were retweeting something someone else said about the war and were obviously interested in the subject.
Same thing would go for getting people to a sales blog. I wouldn't look for people using they keyword 'iPhone', seeing as everyone and their bot is scouring twitter looking for folks interested in them, I would use something like 'my+new+iPhone+accessories'. Someone just got a new iphone and is asking their friends and followers where to get the newest accessories.
The only real downside to this is the more specific a keyword, the fewer people you find per term. You really need a big list of keywords if you want to reach your maximum of 1000 follows per day, and you need to maintain it by adding new keywords associated with your service. As new mobile devices become available, you need to put them in your list. 'love+my+new+nexus+one' for instance.
Once I started using the long tail keyword-ish method for finding folks on Social Snipe, I saw a big growth in the number of click throughs, and had fewer people direct messaging me about their ebooks showing me how to make money on Twitter.
Now, to be fair, Social Snipe is not perfect. It can still be buggy and has it's issues. It's not real pretty, but is very functional. The one time I did run into problem, they were on it like ugly on Waggers.
I really, really like where Social Snipe is going, there is huge potential here. Especially after Digga let me peek at a new tool they will be coming out with soon.
Considering the deal they are offering Wickedfire members, Social Snipe is absolutely worth it.