Although the majority of marketers don’t realize it, Twitter is not just another social media tool, but can be used as a powerful marketing resource.
Since Twitter is so fast paced and needs quite a large number of tweets to be sent every day, it can eat up chunks of your time to implement, monitor and retweet.
This article will help you achieve better results, and provides two little-known ways (one paid and one free) of automating as much of the time-laden tasks as possible.
Before we tackle the two powerful methods that will bring enhanced results, less frustration and boosted productivity, true optimization comes from groundwork that is all too often overlooked, and nothing should be automated until you have a firm plan:
Create A Twitter Strategy
Plan Twitter Goals
It’s important to be clear about your objectives for using each social media channel, as this will drive everything you post.
Once you have clarity about why you’re using Twitter for business in the first place, you can start to build your marketing system which should be based on your target audience, and must include:
- Calls to action
- Landing pages with “hooks” (what is offered to subscribers in exchange for email addresses)
Plan Your Brand
Don’t neglect your social media branding, which should also be planned.
For each social media channel, how do you plan to brand your posts, and how do you plan to keep them consistent, so that they become instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? This is important because it determines what kind of design and images you’ll use. Have a look at Calvin Klein’s Twitter feed – their images all follow the same gray scale look and feel:
Now that the groundwork has been covered, let’s move on to the two powerful automation tips:
Powerful Automation Method #1: Using IFTTT And Google Calendar to Recycle Tweets
To get the best results on Twitter, you’ll need to schedule give or take, 15 posts a day. The good news is that you don’t need to come up with new tweets daily; instead, once you’ve come up with some content, you can recycle it and automate the recycling process so that your posts are sent to Twitter forever if that’s what you desire.
For instance, if you want to promote blog posts, every time you publish a new one, create 15 different tweets for it, and then schedule them in Google Calendar. But before you do that, create an IFTTT applet:
- Create a new account with IFTTT.
- Set up a new applet by clicking on “My Applets”, then “New Applet”.
- Click on “this” – “Google Calendar”.
- Click “Event From Search Starts” which will be the trigger. Using this method will allow you to include a hashtag in the description field of the Google Calendar entry so that IFTTT knows what to trigger. Use something like “#twitter” as the keyword for IFTTT to read and trigger the action.
- Now click “That” – “Twitter”.
- Click “Post a Tweet With Image”.
- In “Tweet Text”, delete the title and it’s brackets, and then click on “”Ingredient” – “Description” to change the Tweet text from Title to After entering “#twitter” in the description field of your Google Calendar entry, you can include additional text, which will be for your reference only.
- What you actually want to write in the tweet must be added to the Event Description of your Google Calendar Event.
- Under the image URL field, click “Ingredient” and click “Where” to place it in the Image URL field. Now you can add the URL of your blog post’s featured image into the “where” field on your Google Calendar Event and it will appear in your tweet. (Note: you will need to upload your images somewhere to get an URL to add to Google Calendar in the “where” field. A suggestion is to use IMGBB.com to upload images for an URL, or you could upload them to your WordPress media. Putting them on Dropbox doesn’t seem to work.)
- Click “Create”.
- Click “Finish”.
Once you’ve set up your applet, this is how it should look:
Now create a social media calendar in Google Calendar to keep everything nice and organized.
To schedule a tweet, all you have to do is create an event on your Google Calendar, making sure to use the title “#twitter”. In the event description, add what you want your tweet to say. In the location field, insert the image URL.
Here’s an example of what your Twitter event in Google Calendar will look like:
It will be simple to repeat any tweet. Follow these instructions.
Be sure to test that it works. Monitor it closely to see that everything works together nicely.
Powerful Automation Method #2: Using Narrow to Increase A High-Quality Targeted Audience
A tool created by a pro developer and a marketing guru, Narrow is a Twitter automation tool which does not just help to build followers, but a high quality targeted audience because this is where the power of Twitter lies.
It automatically unfollows people who don’t follow you back and unlikes tweets within 24 hours, so you can keep your audience targeted.
The tool automatically follows and likes people who would be interested in what you’re selling.
On the dashboard, analyze how your keywords are doing and how many followers that keyword has produced.
Check how many followers you gained in a certain time period, and what the conversion rate is.
When setting up your keywords, the tool provides a sample audience to approve, so you can make sure you’re targeting the right people.
Narrow saves a huge amount of time by automating functions you’d normally need to perform manually. In general, there are a lot of a great way to use web scraping tactics to help you grow your marketing efforts.
In Summary
Optimization and automation can only effectively be implemented after some other things are taken care of, so first things first, plan your Twitter goals – which should be different to your other social media channels and build a social media brand plan.
Then consider these two powerful methods of automating Twitter marketing activities to optimize results and save a huge amount of time and expense:
- Use the Narrow tool to increase the right Twitter followers.
- Recycle tweets with Google Calendar and an IFTTT applet.
