How to Use TwitterFeed for a Consistent Twitter Presence

Used prudently, tools like TwitterFeed can be of great benefit to businesses wishing to expand their Social Networking activities because they ensure you tweet consistently – even if you are busy in your business, away on vacation or unable to be active for personal reaons.

It is amazing how fast time can fly by. If you have long gaps when tweeting you will start to lose Twitter followers, especially among those saavy enough to know about tools that search for inactive Twitter users by the amount of time since their last Tweet.

An easy way to not only maintain a consistent level of activity
and also increase retweets is to use TwitterFeed.

We recommend identifying blogs that are of consistently high quality that are always on topic and using TwitterFeed to have their new content immediately sent to your Twitter account.

Choose blogs that do not post too often – once a day or less works well. We configure TwitterFeed to use Titles only because using descriptions can generate poor quality Tweets.

Use a prefix of New @UserName or a post suffix of Via @UserName
so the blogger receives the Tweet too – and will possibly share it.

There are two benefits to doing this:

1) If you search on your own Twitter username (which is a good practice so you can see who is talking about you) you are much more likely to see new content from your favorite blogs in a timely manner.

2) What you find most interesting is likely to also be of great interest to your followers who are likely to RT (retweet) and share these posts and benefit you, your business and the blogs of those you share.

I am NOT recommending fully automating
your Twitter account because interaction is key!

I am suggesting that backfilling your tweets with high quality content of interest in your niche is a good way to ensure a consistent presence at Twitter.

Like many other great strategies I have learned over the years, Kristi Hines is the source of the specifics of this strategy. Read more about why she also does this and some pros and cons in her post about using TwitterFeed to feed blog posts to Twitter.

Want some excellent tips on how to use Twitter? Read Jeremiah Owyang‘s How to Use Twitter.

UPDATE March 2, 2011: Article Marketing expert Ron Cripps started using this strategy and messaged: “Your twitterfeed tactic is awesome! Here are my stats and I have only put about half in from your feed account so far.

I shared the list of quality blogs I have in my TwitterFeed account in this new post Top Marketing Blogs on GrowMap reading list because Twitter no longer displays the source of your tweets so my followers could not determine what blogs I was feeding.

Before you start, make note of how many followers you have, how many lists you are on, and your Klout and PeerIndex scores and you will have a great case study on how effectively you are growing your (or your clients’) Twitter accounts. If you like this strategy wait until you use my other Strategy to Increase Twitter Followers.

If you ever want to pause one or all of your feeds, you can edit the feed and uncheck “active”, or click “plain list view” and click the pause icon. Special thanks to @twf_support for that tip.

This post and many others are linked from
Twitter Best Practices
Everything you need from getting started videos and posts
to advanced Twitter strategies for influencers all in one place!

Tagged as: Twitter, twitterfeed