Inbound Now #52 - Become more efficient with twitter

Twitter can be a huge time suck. This episode is meant to give you back some of that time.

I have been using twitter for the past 4 years, 7 months, 28 days (wow that is a lot of “look at my sandwich tweets”). In this time, I’ve tried pretty much every twitter tool on the market in search for ways to streamline how I do things.

In this episode, I run through my current setup and how I use twitter on a daily basis and how I’ve been able to grow a number of twitter accounts over the years.

You can follow along and implement the same strategies to streamline your day to day twitter activities and grow an audience.

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1. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a tool that allows you to quickly find influential people in your industry.

Once you find the influencers, look and see who they are following and who follows them. You are likely to find twitter users who are interested in your content as well. Follow them and make sure your twitter profile is interesting with a bunch of useful relevant stuff from your site and more importantly other sources.

SEOMoz recently acquired followerwonk to no doubt make it more awesome. Check out my interview with Rand Fishkin on SEO best practices.

2. SocialBro

I used Social Bro for Follower management both to clean out old twitter people and to manage and create twitter lists.

You can quickly and easily bulk create lists like no other twitter tool I’ve used and it’s become an invaluable tool in my “twitter toolbelt.”

Do not abuse the awesome power of the tool however. Bulk following/unfollowing is abused by many spammers out there and you don’t want to fall into that bucket.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my twitter command center & listening station.

The twitter interface leaves much to be desired for marketing and it’s not easy to exact the infomation you need quickly.

Hootsuite (or use tweetdeck whateves) columns give me a powerful dashboard to sort and filter through a bunch of information quickly and efficiently.

For more on how I use hootsuite to find and engage with relevant conversations see this past episode: Advanced Twitter Search Techniques: How to Find Relevant Business Conversations.

Hootsuite recently launched an app marketplace, somewhere in there InboxQ.com has a tool to help find questions as well.

4. BufferApp

Buffer is awesome and I’ve written about it on multiple occasions. It allows the user to stagger out posts throughout the day instead of barfing all of your awesome tweets at your followers all at once. (sorry for the visual)

I’d recommend against buffering facebook posts however because it comes off as lazy and manual posts to facebook with a custom catchy graphic will always* outperform a third party app post.

Check out Ifttt.com as well. It will allow you to extend buffer to make it far more useful.

5. Inbound Now’s Follow to Download App

Shameless self promotion! We created a free app to allow users to entice people to follow their twitter account in exchange for a content download.

It’s pretty easy to use and setup and it will help seed growth to your twitter account.

Live example below, Click Follow to Activate Download:

Go Forth and Tweet.