Eventually you do learn, apparently. It took me quite a long time to make Facebook work when I first got on there three or so years ago. Now I’ve spent the past several months trying to figure out how people are making Twitter work and what value it has. I think I’ve found some ways that make a lot of sense, are easy and free to set up. Best yet, a couple of these services are either partially or completely automated. For a busy parent, automated is an excellent thing.
The first service I figured out when I first got onto Twitter was that you could automatically feed your Twitter content to both Facebook and LinkedIn. This is done through the Twitter App, which you access straight through Facebook (use FB search and you’ll find it). Over time this app has morphed and changed a bit, but it still does the basic – I tweet, and my Facebook friends see the tweet and can comment on it.
Next I caught onto TwitterFeed. This service simply allows your blog posts (like this one) to automatically be posted to your Twitter followers. No more copying and shortening links and writing up a separate tweet every time you blog. For some reason, the RSS version of this service didn’t work for me and I had to switch to my Atom feed, but once I did that the automation worked great. A half hour later and everyone sees my blog post. And since my Twitter cross-posts to Facebook, that cuts out another round of copying and pasting.
My Twitter numbers really took off, though, when I started using Formulists. Previously, I think I had only two self-administered lists. With Formulists, you use a few clicks and set a few parameters and it’ll make up your lists for you. It also has introduced me to other listers, who have listed me in major numbers. I actually have more lists than followers. That looks a little funny, but I’m not complaining because along with those listings come consistent followers who find me. Having followers is never bad.
Along the way, I also discovered FutureTweets. This is a simple program and its web interface looked so rudimentary that I was skeptical it would work. But it worked all right. I write a tweet (or particularly a series of tweets) I want to send later, choose the time and it tweets to my followers on schedule. This is great if you want to spread out your tweets or if you don’t want it to look like you’re tweeting while you’re at work. Honestly, of all these programs I’ve mentioned, I had the easiest and least frustrating time using FutureTweets.
Lastly, I found SocialOomph, which does what FutureTweets does, but also a bunch of other things. The best things I use it for is to automatically follow anyone who has followed me, and to send an automatic reply message to my new followers. I know others frown on the second part of that, but you know what, I only get so many opportunities to put a link out that makes me money (by selling books or through affiliate marketing). The auto-responder allows me to send that message out at least once to everyone that follows me. If I don’t, there’s a chance they’ll follow me and never see anything from me (due to timing of my tweets or because they simply don’t pay attention). The autofollow options also seems to be cementing in my followers at a faster rate than before, which is always good.
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