The Twitterverse hates shameless self-promotion, but if you are using Twitter as a way to promote your business, how do you get around Twitter's dislike of self-promotion? That is easy. You share more than you promote. At most, your Twitter feed should be 30-percent self-promotional tweets. The rest of your time should be spent engaging with your followers and promoting what is called curated content.
Of course, spending all day searching the web and tweeting interesting content is a waste of time. That is why using a program to automate your business Twitter feed is a must. Using a program like BufferApp, you can quickly add compelling content to your twitter queue.
If you dabble with multiple web projects or ventures, this is a very effective tool. I use it to automate content for an MLM blog resource portal...and a FG Xpress review site. The time saved alone using this tool is north of 3 hours a week. Let me break it down for you:
Step 1: Download and Setup BufferApp
Currently, BufferApp allows you to use their product for 30 days before purchasing. At that point, they offer several packages priced according to number of linked accounts and tweets per month. When you sign up for the trial, you can download the applet or the browser extension. For the purposes of this guide, we will use the browser extension.
(An alternative is Social Oomph, and they offer virtually the same services as BufferApp, minus the browser feature and auto DM messaging. Otherwise, it appears the basic features are unlimited and free.)
The first thing you will do is link your Twitter account to BufferApp. Next, you will choose how many tweets you want to make a day and at what times those tweets will post.
Step 2: Filling Your Queue
Filling your queue is quick and easy. As you are spending a Monday afternoon catching up on the latest industry trends, you can simultaneously be adding to your Twitter queue. As you read an interesting article, click the BufferApp button in your browser and add the article to your queue. This allows you to fill your queue with a week's worth of Tweets in one afternoon.
Step 3: Review and Modify Your Queue
Remember those self-promotional tweets? After filling up your queue with a week's worth of curated tweets, you can go back and schedule your own self-promotional tweets. BufferApp offers an analytics feature that allows you to see any actions regarding your tweets. This feature allows you to ensure tweets promoting your site or service post when they are most likely to be seen by your followers.
Automating your Twitter feed saves time and ensures that you are not saturating your feed with promotional tweets. In a matter of few afternoons, you can have a month's worth of tweets queued up and ready to go. While there are other media automation services on the market, such as utah-based SEO Pro League, or HootSuite, BufferApp's ability to auto-schedule tweets is a huge time saver and sets it apart from other similar services.
In closing, I offer a friendly reminder to not substitute these automation practices in place of engaging with your listeners, as you will be missing out on the most important aspect of social media. Use this practice to become more effective in your day-to-day operations, and liberate yourself from signing into Twitter multiple times a day to dish out new content.
How often do you tweet? Have you used any type of Twitter automation services? What has been your experience?