I’m a busy working mom. I don’t have time to sit on Twitter all day tweeting and retweeting. And I don’t want to just let it sit stagnantly. So I automate my Twitter. And I use a lot of tools to help me do it. Let me tell you about a few of my favorites.
Tweetdeck
I don’t know what I would do without Tweetdeck. It’s the only way I view Twitter. Tweetdeck organizes your Twitter feed into columns that you can see all at once. The columns are all completely customizable. Not only can you choose the columns that you see, but you can also filter them down to whatever you want to see. Exclude retweets, only show tweets with images, or search for hashtags.
Mine are mostly comprised of lists. I have my notifications first, then my tweets, messages, and all of my lists. You can link multiple accounts to your Tweetdeck, so I have my personal account’s tweets and notifications at the end of my Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck lets you schedule your tweets. This is probably my favorite feature. Twitter moves FAST. Even though I have thousands of followers, one tweet may only have 80 impressions. Your followers aren’t on Twitter all the time, and unless you can get into their “you might have missed this” feed, they aren’t going to see your tweet from 2 hours ago. I schedule a tweet (with an image because they’re more eye-catching) every 3 hours on new post day.
Find your Twitter Tribe
Get together with a few other bloggers in your niche and agree upon retweeting and engaging with each other’s tweets every week. I was lucky to find a great Twitter Tribe in the Mom Blog Tribe Facebook group. You can create your own tribe by asking for a handful of other bloggers to participate or ask around to see if there’s already one set up. It’s a great way to connect with other bloggers and increase your engagement.
Revive Old Post
The Revive Old Post plugin for WordPress is one of the best autopilot tools for Twitter. It will automatically tweet a random blog post throughout the day. You can set it for one every three hours or once a day. You can even set it for three every hour. If you don’t have a whole lot of posts, I would set it for at least 6 hours between tweets. But if you have quite a few posts, go ahead and do them once every hour or two.
Add hashtags or anything else to your auto-tweets. I add #momblogger to the end of mine. If there’s a post or two that you don’t want to tweet, just exclude them. This is a good feature if you have a lot of holiday or seasonal posts.
Linkis
I randomly stumbled upon Linkis from another blogger’s link. It’s a way of branding your links. A little box or header will appear with your name and social profiles when your link is clicked on. I chose a header bar but the default is a box at the bottom right.
Linkis will automatically reformat your links that aren’t manually typed into the text box. If you use a share button or Revive Old Post, it will brand them.
Fun fact: You can tell how many people use your Revive Old Post links because your analytics will show Linkis as the referrer rather than Twitter.
IFTTT
If This Then That is an excellent tool that has a billion options. You can push your Facebook or Instagram posts to your Twitter feed. Or you can do this crazy little hack to get into people’s notifications. Automatically add people to a list if they use a particular hashtag. When you add someone to a public list, they get a notification. So you show up in their notification feed, and they may or may not follow you. Odds are they’ll at least check out your profile and pinned tweet. I feel like this is a less annoying version of the auto-DM.
Instagram does have the option to push your posts to Twitter. It does only include a link. If you use IFTTT to push your Instagram to Twitter, it will actually post the photo. But the preview for the link will sometimes show up in particular views on Twitter. It doesn’t show for mobile, but it does show on desktop and Tweetdeck. If you don’t use IFTTT, it’s super easy to just enable your Instagram post to push to Twitter. It’s also great to get new followers to your Instagram account.
Looking for Pinterest tips? Check out my secret to increasing your pageviews with Pinterest!
Buffer
Buffer is how I schedule my retweets. I don’t pay for it, so I only get ten queue spots. I’ll fill up my queue every night for the next day and enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about my Twitter feed being active all day. I set up ten timeslots, and just try to keep it filled up. It will email you if your queue is empty.
Buffering retweets is especially handy if you’re in a Facebook group that does retweet threads.
Roundteam
Roundteam puts your retweets on complete autopilot. You just need to set it for who you want to retweet and how often you want it to do its thing. And then you just let it be. It will retweet new tweets of the people on your roundteam. The only downside to this is you may not want to retweet blindly. I suggest only putting bloggers you trust on this list.
I have mine set to:
- no retweets (which means I won’t be retweeting their retweets)
- 0-3 hashtags
- 0-1 mentions
- 20 RT probability (I’m still not sure what that is, but it’s default I think)
- 120-minute retweet interval.
They recently changed their free plan, so you get 200 retweets per month and once you use them up, it pauses your Roundteam. So don’t use all 200 in the first week.
Statusbrew
You can schedule tweets with Statusbrew, but I use it to track unfollowers and grow my following. It shows your recent unfollowers, your mutual followers, your fans (those who follow you but you don’t follow back), and people who don’t follow you back. They let you follow 50 people per day and unfollow 100.
When I decide to work on my following, I’ll copy followers of similar Twitter accounts. I don’t copy every single one. Only the ones I think would be my target audience. I max out my 50 follows and give them a few days to follow me back. If they don’t, I’ll go through my not following back list and unfollow. If they do follow, awesome! I don’t unfollow. I know some people do. You know how I know this? When I go through my recent unfollows it asks me if I want to unfollow them. I see you!
What tools did I miss? Do you use any of these tools?
Let me know in the comments below!
Inez says
This is awesome!! I hadn’t heard of Linksis. I’m going to check that out. Also, thanks for the Mom Blog Tribe shout out!! 🙂
Kendra says
This post helped me SO much! THANK YOU!
Niki @ Toot's Mom is Tired says
No prob!