Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms out there. When thinking of social media marketing for our business we immediately think of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (probably in that order). We must come up with a strategy to use all three and integrate them in our marketing plan. However, as a solopreneur we should also think of how can we spend our time effectively and wisely. This can include automated some of your social media tools.
We all know social media is about the human interaction and creating relationships with potential customers and clients. So one may think that automation may not fit into that category. Scheduling time to interact with your social media platforms is important, but when you begin to plan out your strategy for each platform your social media efforts may begin to look like a full-time job. When using twitter (or any other social media platform) we don’t want to bombard our followers with sales, products and continued information only about our business. It gets tiring to listen to someone toot their own horn everyday and that’s not how you provide value. People want to know that you are about providing valuable information even if it’s not your own information. There are a few things that I like to put into practice for my clients as they tweet (and we will talk about that in another post) but one of them is to provide content. You can provide content by tweeting your new blog post, retweeting an article or blog post relevant to your industry and by using an rss feed. That’s right an rss feed! To do this we can use a free tool called twitterfeed.
I stumbled across Twitterfeed as I was searching for a way to provide continuous content via twitter without having to spend the time searching and filtering through rss feeds to find out what’s the most important content to post. Not only that all the feeds that I have how can sift through them all and be productive. Well Twitterfeed allows you to post content through an rss feed. You may have already subscribed to someone’s blog via rss feed and receive updates via email or through your rss reader. Well now you can tweet the various articles and blog post from that feed right to twitter. It’s actually quite simple to set up and takes all of minutes. You can tell it how often to post and how many posts at a time. You can shorten the URL using bit.ly and you can also add a post prefix and/or a post suffix. Very cool and convenient.
My Thoughts!!!!
Okay so I’ve been using Twitterfeed for all of a few days now and to be honest I like it. I created a Google Alert for the word phrase “Keyword Research” and subscribed to this alert via rss. I also subscribed to Mashable and Social Media Examiner (great content at these places). I copied and paste the rss feed into the specified location, set the time I wanted it posted and also added whatever prefix or suffix to the tweet. Then maybe about a few hours later posts started generating (maybe minutes but I really wasn’t paying attention). I know longer had to worry about searching and providing content. It is now being done automatically.
The number of followers that I have has increased since using this tool. Before I would get some emails letting me know that people are following me, now I get these emails daily and quite a few people at a time. However I can’t help but to wonder if I could now be annoying. Some of the sites that you may subscribe too may post 3 and 4 times a day and depending on how many feeds you have coming in could someone decide not to follow you because you are cluttering up there stream? If you decided to use this tool I strongly suggest that you come up with a strategic plan on how to implement it effectively.
So do you use Twitterfeed? What is your strategy? What are other social Media Management tools out there that you enjoy?
