Engagement is important when it comes to using Twitter but, you have a day job, right? A good way to keep your social network outlets up to date with fresh content is to get some help from RSS feeds from topics of your interest and other social media tools.
For example on my Identika Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/identika) I tweet constantly about topics relevant to my business and my clients/audience. Those include Cybersecurity, Social Media, Government 2.0, etc.
Here’s what I do:
- Create Google Alerts of the topic of your preference and send them to RSS feeds
- Use Twitterfeed, Hootsuite, or the tool of your preference to setup your automatic tweets and link them to your Twitter or Facebook accounts (you will need the RSS feed string you created with Google Alerts). Tweak the automated feed to filter our unwanted results. You can also set the interval at which each feeds will be published.
- Once the feeds are setup and running make sure to check out your postings or tweets. It is likely a few bad postings will go through and you may want to delete them. This will in turn help you tweak the filters on Google Alerts and Twitterfeed.
You can also create more sophisticated Google Alerts by first using Google Insights for Search and other Google tools to determine the quality of certain keywords in certain regions. Garbage In, Garbage Out, right?
Once you start serving relevant content, expect a lot if interaction from your followers in the form of retweets, replies, and comments. Also, you should see and increase in the number of followers. The more relevant your content, the more followers and interaction you are going to get. I only use it for Twitter for the moment and it works very well.
Do you ever get people dropping you because you are twittering too much – or retweeting an article several times because the Google Alert has picked it up? Or is this part of the fine tuning?
Michael, for the most part I do not see duplicates very often but if a topic is hot (i.e. Egypt protests) you may definitely see very similar tweets.
I setup my tweets at 3 to 12 hour intervals (depending on the topic) and try to fine tune the Alerts to avoid those instances. I also tweet no more than one or two feeds at a time. Twitterfeed (and other tools) also let you parse the feed and add prefixes, hash tags and filters.