How To Automate Your Twitter Account | 3 Easy Steps

If your Twitter activity is dominating your time, and you have little time left for activities that grow your top line revenue, then you’re a perfect candidate to learn how to automate your Twitter account correctly.

The Twitter Double Edge Sword

You need to be constantly pushing a variety of content towards your Twitter audience. Anything less than consistent constancy will not work anymore.

Tweeting just 2 or 3 times a day is not going to cut it. Nor can you Tweet 2 or 3 times an hour. Your Tweets will just get lost in the sea of other Tweets.

If you’ve looked at your Twitter Home Timeline, the life of your Tweets are more than likely less than 5 minutes. In my case, it’s under 30 seconds. By the time I read one Tweet, at least 20 more pop up, and are waiting to be read. Once I click on “Show More Tweets”, the original Tweet that I was reading has gone – never to be seen again – forever.

That’s why, to get adequate coverage and a ‘permanent’ presence on Twitter, you must selectively automate your Twitter Account. Manual Tweeting will not work anymore.

In this article, I am going to show you how to automate your Twitter Account in 3 very easy steps. Once you automate your Twitter Account, you will no longer suffer from Twitter Time Suck, and have more time for other meaningful business activities such as:

Speaking and meeting new clients
Closing new business
Developing Business Partner Relationships
Paying the government their tax dues :)

Just one important point though…

You can’t and should not automate everything on Twitter. You still need to converse with your audience. Your (unautomated) presence is needed to answer questions, develop relationships, and engage. Automation will and cannot replace that.

So what content do you automate?

Simply put, everything that is repetitive in nature and that does not need the human touch. A great starting point is to assess your Twitter content and decide – automate or not.

This following items may give you an idea of content that I feel warrants automation:

Your blog content. Each blog post.
Your product information and services. May be on multiple website pages or just one.
Your valuable giveaway products. You know, the ones that you exchange for contact information. Also known as an ethical bribe.
Cross connection links – Links that introduce your audience to your other Social Media Platforms

Without a doubt, everything in the above list is automatable (if there is such a word :) ). Once you automate, you will become more efficient, and will have more time to focus your energies where they count best.

In 3 easy steps, let’s peel away a layer and learn what and how to automate your Twitter account and content.

Step #1: Know Thy Twitter Audience

You need to understand your audience in great detail. Incredibly important!

Their demographics and physcograhics will tell you the exact content that you want to expose them too. Get this step right and you’ve mastered 80% of the Twitter Marketing challenge.

Get to know where your audiences hangs out
Understand their content demands
Know when they use Twitter

Knowing this information will help you setup and fine tune your Twitter automation (Step #2). You can use tools such as CrowdBooster, SocialBro, and 14 Blocks to help you understand your audience better.

Step #2. Do The Twitter Math

A little bit of math will help you figure out the amount of content that you require for Twitter Automation.

Let’s start with the Tweet “Recycle Frequency”. In short you need to know how often to recycle your content and start the Tweet sequence from the beginning. Recycle frequency has an impact on the amount of content you need.

This analogy may help…

Imagine that you are hosting a party of 20 or more people – finger foods, beverages and music.

If you’re like me, you would probably apply your handy efficiency formula to everything…

Friends: Non negotiable – no efficiency formula here. You must interact with them. No option. No automation.

Finger foods: I would probably walk around the party once or twice at the beginning of the evening offering the foods. The rest of the evening my friends would find the finger foods themselves. Doing it this way, saves me time, allowing me more time to interact with my friends.

Beverages: I would typically prepare their first beverage of choice, and then show them where they can help themselves to subsequent beverages. This is a big time saver, because my friends like beverages, and I could interact more with them, doing it this way.

Music: Totally automated. I would make sure that the repeat shuffle is set to the on position for the entire folder of songs. That way I do not have to spend time looking for more music, giving me the time to be social. Total efficiency.

The Twitter automated recycle frequency is similar in concept to the music analogy mentioned above. When your music player finishes the last song, it will ‘repeat’, starting again from song one. From a Twitter perspective, when you send out the last Tweet in an automated batch, you will need to ‘replay’ your Tweets from the beginning.

The length of time that you wish to recycle Tweets dictates the amount of content you need. The longer the duration the more content is required. Conversely, the shorter the frequency, less content is required.

Once you’ve established a recycle frequency (e.g. 30, 60, 90 days), you can evaluate the content you wish to automatically Tweet. As an example, you may have 100 blog posts, 5 Product and Services Pages, 1 Contact Me Page, 2 Give Away Product Pages, and 5 Product Sales Pages.

That is a total of 113 Pages.

This is where it gets interesting. You can turn the 113 pages into 339 Tweetable items, easily. You just need to construct 3 variations of each Tweet, and as each Tweet is used by the automated system, it is recycled back into the queue reservoir to be tweeted automatically at a later date.

An example of how 3 Tweet variations could look like:

Original Tweet:
How To Increase Organic Traffic http://goo.gl/IZLtqS To Your Website – 3 Solid Case Studies #smm #b2b

Variation 1:
3 Solid Case Studies http://goo.gl/IZLtqS How To Increase Organic Traffic To Your Website #smm #b2b

Variation 2:
Learn From These Guys http://goo.gl/IZLtqS How To Increase Organic Website Traffic #smm #b2b

You should notice that the content for each variation is different. However the link will take the audience to the exact same location.

What’s your Tweet Recycle frequency? 30 days? 60 days? Longer? Keep in mind, the longer your replay frequency, the more content you need.

With 339 pieces of content, a recycle frequency of 30 days, and assuming a 160 hours month, means you would be sending 2 tweets per hour. Frankly speaking, 2 Tweets per hour will not give you the presence you need on Twitter to be effective. Remember, you need to be publishing continuously on Twitter to be effective.

There are many different opinions about how many tweets you should be sending out, but my opinion is that you should target around 5-10 Tweets per hour, which will give you the presence and visibility you need on Twitter.

The bottom line, however – it depends on your business, the amount of followers your followers have, and when your audience is monitoring their Twitter feed.

5-10 Tweets per hour (or 1 Tweet every 10-15 minutes) means you need 800-1,600 Tweets for a 30 day Tweet recycle frequency.

You already have 339 Tweets. Right?

Subtract 339 from the 800 to 1,600 range. That equates to roughly 460 Tweets on the low end, and 1,260 more Tweets on the high end.

Finding the remaining content to Tweet can be fun and rewarding. Here are a few content ideas:

Search Google for “Motivational Quotes”
Come up with your own Quotes
Develop 100-120 character business tips for your audience
Look through your photo collection, meme the images, and create the Tweet for each one
Take a powerful statement from each blog article and create a Tweet from it
Create 3 variations of each piece of content.

Step #3: Automate Twitter With Socialoomph

A little hard work upfront will go a long way. Collecting the content is hard work, but once you load the content into the automated content buckets, you will have so much time available, that you won’t know what to do with it. :)

Socialoomph was one of my game changers. Before I used Socialoomph, my return on Twitter investment was zero. A big fat zero!

However, after using Socialoomph to selectively automate my Twitter feed, business growth was evident. The time I was spending on Twitter Tweeting, was replaced by automatic the Tweets of selected content. The results:

New Clients
New Business Partners
Information To Develop New Products
Sales Revenue Increase

After you get to the SocialOomph website:

1. Signup and Authorize Twitter. This will give you access to the Socialoomph Platform, and authorize it to use your Twitter account.

2. Create the content buckets in Socialoomph. You can create a bucket for each genre of Tweet. For example you may have all blog content Tweeting from one bucket, while motivational quotes can come from a separate bucket.

Creating several content buckets is meaningful. It allows you to be organized, and each bucket can be configured with it’s individual characteristics.

For example one bucket may Tweet once every 6 hours from Monday to Friday 9am-5pm. A different bucket may Tweet only weekends between 9am and noon. Or perhaps a bucket for Monday morning themed content, sent weekly on Monday mornings.

The Socialoomph content buckets are extremely flexible.

3. Upload your content into the Socialoomph Queue reservoirs (content buckets). Uploading each file of contents into their respective content buckets literally takes a few minutes. Once upload, everything is in auto drive.

That’s it! You are finished!

Final Twitter Automation Words

Time is a valuable commodity – a commodity you don’t want to waste.

You just need to find the right balance of manual and automation, and use the right tools to get the job done.

The steps are relatively straight forward to selectively automate on Twitter:

Figure out what your audience wants and needs
Do the math and select your content for auto Tweeting
Signup, configure, and load your content into Socialoomph.

Here’s more about the process and a few select tools our clients use for their digital marketing efforts.