If you do any form of online marketing (or own a blog), you may have considered automating certain tweets at once. Although many programs and plug-ins can be used to automate Twitter, there are certainly some programs and plug-ins that are much more effective than others. I hope that even if you are currently automating a tweet (or want to start), this article is still helpful to you.
Why Automating Tweets Is a Must for Blogs
I personally believe that if you have a blog (or are an avid internet marketer) it is highly suggested to automate some of your tweets.
Some will undoubtedly disagree with me on this subject — (but don’t worry) — I’m not going to make a claim like this without at least providing you with some valid evidence for why would say this.
Reason #1: Everybody is Doing it
While this logic certainly doesn’t work for everything, (and I’m sure your ears are ringing with “if everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it?” as mine are), I would still encourage you to take me seriously when I use this reason. When researching how and if I should automate my own tweets, I found an interesting chart that I feel some of you might enjoy seeing.
Take a look at the chart below:
What this chart clearly depicts is how dominant Twitter has become in terms of a social network.
Likewise, you probably can guess which statistic stood out to me the most — (note: it’s the one I obnoxiously highlighted using photoshop ) “60% of Tweets come from third party applications. “
That statistic absolutely baffles me. While I have for a while used quite a lot of applications that integrate with Twitter, I have only rarely used another application to tweet.
Maybe I should be, right?
I would imagine that not all 60% of those tweets are automated, but I would wager that a large number of them are. And after I’ve pondered that stat even more, I’m even more convinced that I need to be automating some of my Tweets.
I hope that this will at least challenge you to consider doing the same. But now let’s dive in to those 5 excellent ways to automate your tweets.
Five Tools for Twitter Automation
WordPress ‘Tweet Old Post’ Plugin
This plugin is one that I just recently added to my site, and (at this point) I have been very satisfied with it.
The main purpose of this plugin is that it provides you with a way to effectively promote some of the older (yet still relevant) content of your blog by sending an automated tweet linking to the page. This plugin’s settings page makes it very easy to choose which posts from your blog you want it to automatically post for you on Twitter (even those posts that are relatively new).
While this plugin can be a very effective (and 100% free) way to automatically tweet some of your content to your followers, I would definitely encourage you to not abuse it. The more tweets you send out do not necessarily mean more traffic to your blog. What it definitely does mean, however, is another tweet in your followers twitter feed.
I personally keep having to remind myself of this – but with as much auto-tweet spam I get in my own Twitter Feed, it’s hard not to forget
Hootsuite
In my honest opinion, this program is by far the best auto-tweet site out there. I personally have found this application to be immensely helpful in aiding my own auto tweeting needs.
I actually recently began using this, and (unless they fall of the face of the planet) I imagine I shall be using it for a long time to come.
The great thing about HootSuite is the amount of potential they offer in regards to automating your tweets. They make it very easy to schedule your tweets manually using their calendar; or (if you’re more ambitious) you can use their bulk upload feature and upload an excel file in which you can preschedule up to 350 tweets.
While the bulk scheduling feature is only a part of the paid version, I would argue it’s worth it and here’s why I upgraded:
1. The potential traffic that you can draw using a site like HootSuite
Hootsuite has the potential to significantly aid you in drawing traffic to your blog. Likewise, if theoretically you wish to tweet 10 times a day (which is quite a bit) you can preschedule up to 35 days in advance.
2. The ability to do this with more twitter and social media accounts
I’ll be honest, I have a ton of social media accounts. As such, I would like to do a lot of automating. Having the premium version allows me to automate an unlimited amount of social media accounts – Facebook pages, other Twitter Accounts, etc.
3. You Also Get a Free Trial For 30 days
I’m a sucker for free trials. And with a program like Hootsuite I couldn’t help but give it a go. I know the potential that Hootsuite has, and I’d argue that using it alone will draw traffic that will be more valuable than the $9.99 monthly fee. (Not to mention it saves me a whole lot of time). While I haven’t used it for a full month yet, I’m predicting that I’m going to keep the paid version going. Just after using it for a while and seeing the number of extra visitors I’m getting from Twitter by monitoring my site’s stats in Google Analytics, I’m pretty sure I’ll keep paying for it.
Even if you feel the paid version isn’t for you, the free version still offers very powerful options for automating your tweets.
Tweet Adder
While I personally don’t use this application, I’ve heard a bunch of excellent reviews regarding this product. Tweet Adder is actually a program you download to your computer and operate as software. Although the tweet-automating capabilities of this product are excellent, it’s actually known to be more effective for it’s mass-following capabilities. This program offers the ability to locate followers based on a few very specific keywords and follow them.
A program such as this can help you to not only grow your blog’s audience via tweet-automating, but also grow your Twitter audience.
Feel free to check out this product more at the Tweet Adder Homepage, or read more in my article on how to gain more followers using Tweet Adder.
Future Tweets
Future Tweets is another helpful application that you can easily integrate with your Twitter account to auto post tweets.
While I personally don’t use this application, it’s clear that many other people do – as they boast on their homepage of their all-time tweets sent by Future Tweet’s users.
ScheduleYourTweets
And the last but not least way I’m presenting (in this article) to automate your tweets is “ScheduleYourTweets.”
While the name pretty much says it all, there are a few things to note.
This site is also an application you link with your Twitter account and it’s also free to use. And while they don’t boast of how many people use their site, I’m certain there are definitely a few out there. ☺
Final Words and Thoughts
So there you have it. I hope that the above list provides you with some tools and motivation to jumpstart or modify your twitter automation practices.
While there are definitely a few other ways to automate your tweets on Twitter, I personally found those listed above to be the most helpful and relevant ways to do it.
Here’s a Question I have regarding the post…
Do you get annoyed by automated Tweets? Are their any applications or plugins you use that I left out?