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Using Twitter is not only about creating guidelines and following those, its about tweeting content to your followers and engaging with them. When tweeting content, it should be relevant to your niche. If it’s not relevant then you could start loosing your followers. So in general, try and keep your tweets on topic. But at no time should you ignore your @mentions (unless they are spammers) and your followers, even it is off topic. For me, I pretty much stay on topic. Sometimes I find stuff that is off topic and I think it’s important to share, then I will share it with everyone. But when I do this I try and keep it to a minimum and I try and space it through the day by scheduling these types of tweets.
If you are a more than casual user of Twitter, then the first thing I would recommend is to stop using the Twitter site’s to do all of your tweeting and reading of your Twitter stream. You need to get yourself a good reliable Twitter client. Even though Twitter has done a great job with upgrades to their site, its still not as user friendly as the Twitter clients are, The website is good for quick checks of the site and changing your settings. Other than that, you can do everything on a Twitter client and more then on the website.
Twitter Clients
When I first started using Twitter, I tried out every recommended client and even a few new ones that looked promising. Of course, I was disappointed with most of them. With most clients, I had to use several different ones since most clients had limited features. Finally I came across TweetDeck and I used that for a while, but after a while, I had a lot of problems loading and using this client. The major complaint I had is not the features, but the application is a desktop application that is a system resource hog. For my production desktop, this isn’t a problem, but when I am on my netbook or an older computer, it causes a lot off issues and I have to limit the amount of programs I have open. So I went back to looking for a better client. Finally I came across Hootsuite and instantly I found my favorite client. Its feature rich and offers a premium service for those that are Twitter power users and enterprise users.
Out of all the Twitter clients I have tested, I have three that I would recommend using.
Scheduling Tweets
In part one of the Twitter guide I mentioned that we shouldn’t flood everyone’s stream with a ton of tweets. What I mean by this, is if you tweet five or more tweets in less than a minute or if you send out a lot of tweets in less than a fifteen minute period, you might want to start scheduling tweets. By scheduling your tweets over the day, you do not clog up everyone streams. Another benefit of scheduling your tweets, is you can schedule your blog entries, press releases and anything you have important to share during the peak times when your readers will most likely to see your tweets.
For me, I schedule my tweets for a variety reasons. The main reason I schedule Tweets is because of the limited time I am on Twitter each day. The second reason is, I am a fast reader and I have all my favorite blogs / magazines setup in Google Reader. Because of those reasons, I can read up to five or six short articles in a very short time. So what I like to do is to schedule tweets throughout a 24 hour period or over the weekend when I am not on as much. That way, I have am constantly tweeting and not going a day without Tweeting.
I also like to schedule Tweets for my latest articles and I schedule these Tweet out during the high traffic times of days. If its article that I feel is important, I will Tweet it out two or three times for one day. I have followers from all over the world and by tweeting out two to three times per article for one day; most of my readers will have a better chance of seeing my tweet. But in most cases, I will spread these tweets out over several days. That way its, not considered spamming.
From what most of the blogs I have read, they all say that we should never tweet out the same message more than four times a day, and they should be spread out so that the repeated tweet is tweeted every 8 hours in a twenty four hour period. Personally, I think its better to do it only twice day. I have more success with tweeting once during the day and once at night.
I have found that the best time to tweet those important tweets, are from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM during the lunch hours, after 6:00 PM during the week and after 6:00 PM on the weekends. As for the weekend, I haven’t really found an ideal time, but it seems that Sunday afternoons seem to be best.
Another important part of scheduling tweeting, is keep from having days when you do not tweet. I have read articles that say that in order to keep our followers interested and not unfollowing us, we need to tweet anywhere between ten and twenty tweets a day. In my research, I found that if I only tweeted a few tweets a day or non at all, I lost followers and my important tweets were less likely to be retweeted when I was actively tweeting. So I try and have at least 10 tweets a day and if I am going out of town, I schedule enough tweets for those days I am away from Twitter so my account will stay active. If you are concerned about finding enough tweets to keep your followers happy, I will go into detail about how to get more tweets by using RSS feeds.
Best Tools for Scheduling Tweets
There are so many tools that you can use to schedule tweets, but the easiest is to use Hootsuite. Hootsuite has a scheduler built right into the client and you can schedule to other social networks as well. But if you do not use Hootsuite, there are plenty of services that you can use to accomplish this. Out all of the schedulers I have tried, these are my favorites.
What You Can and Can’t Automate on Twitter
Have you noticed, those twitter users, contently tweeting or they have next to no followers, but are following a thousand people? Those people are considered spammers and bots (in most cases). These users automate everything they can and let Twitter sort it out. These types of users you want to stay way. Most of the time all they do is tweet stuff that everyone else is tweeting or they are sending out links to spam pages trying to get you buy their products or scams. Sometimes you may come across a bot that is useful and if you do find one, then its alright to follow those. 
When using Twitter, you shouldn’t automate everything; this is not what social media all about, its about being social. Besides, automating everything, bots, and spammers are against Twitter user agreement. It will get your account suspended or deleted. In my opinion there only few things on Twitter you can automate.
My list of Twitter Features You Shouldn’t Automate
- Never automate one hundred percent of your tweets
- Never Automate Your Follows and Unfollows – Twitter will suspend your account if you follow and unfollow to many people in certain amount of time. Use services such as Tweepi to add and remove followers manually.
My List of Services you Can Automate
- You can automate some of your Tweets. Use services such as Twaitter and TwitterFeed to automate, your blog articles and those of your most trusted bloggers and friends.
- Use SocialOomph to auto send Direct Message those that follow you. Thank them and maybe send them a full URL link to your site. Does this work? Sometimes. I am still testing this and so far it seems to be working.
How Do I Auto Tweet other Blog Posts?
As mentioned before it is alright to auto tweet some of your tweets. For me, I only auto Tweet a few blogs and those are ones I would tweet their articles anyways. I auto tweet these articles, because I trust these sites and they almost always have something use for my followers.
To setup your Twitter account to Auto Tweet, you need to use services such as Twaitter, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite Pro and know the RSS feed of the sites you want to auto tweet those articles by your Twitter account. Once you have that information, then you can configure Twaitter or Twitterfeed to Tweet out. I would recommend limiting the number of times each RSS feed you setup to tweet to only once an hour or once a day. This way, you won’t dump a ton of tweets into your followers’ stream.
Of the automated tweet services, Hootsuite Pro is my favorite. It gives you more options, and you can send your tweets to other social networks as well. But if you do not want to pay for the premium service, Twaitter is the next best option. Not many people use this service, but its easy to setup, and they are always adding more features. If you are going to use TwitterFeed, I would limit the use of this service, many spammers and bots abuse this service and some may think you are a spammer or a bot and report you for spamming. If you have more than two or three feeds you want to tweet, then I would use Twaitter or Hootsuite Pro.
Best Way To Tweet Links
When tweeting links, you should always use a URL shortener. This not only shortens your URL to give you more space to add content but, it also can be used as a way to track how many people are clicking and retweeting your tweets. My favorite shorteners are Bit.ly and Su.PR. Both shorteners, offers stats but that seem to be more accurate. Here are just a few of the more popular ones.
URL Shorteners
Following and Unfollowing Tools
As for auto following services for Twitter, I would stay away from those. Most of those services are not very good at following users for your target keywords for who you follow and unfollow. The users the service does autofollow may not be the best followers for you. You might be getting spammers and bots that the service hasn’t weeded out yet. Remember, having a large following isn’t as good as having smaller following that actually retweets your content and engages with you.
If you are having issues finding more followers or you want to flush out users that are no longer tweeting, the only service I recommend is Tweepi. This service offers manual following services and several different options to manually remove those you do not want to follow you back. I generally go though once a week and remove users that do not follow me back, but I never remove more that thousand at a time (almost never happens) in a twenty four hour period and if you have less than two thousand followers, I would never remove more than two hundred and fifty users in twenty four period. I will go into more detail about how I follow and unfollow users in Twitter. 
The final tool that I use and had a lot of success with is the ebook Twitter Dummy (aff link) by John Anguiar who has over seventy thousand followers. In his ebook, he goes over all of his secrets to gaining followers and how to get followers to retweet your content. I will be going into more detail about this ebook and how I go about getting more followers in next part of the guide.
Final Thoughts
As mentioned before, I am not an expert at using Twitter, I have only had a few years of using Twitter, and the resources that I provide in the Twitter Guide, are things that I do daily and have a lot of success with. These resources should help anyone struggling with Twitter or just wanted to streamline Twitter and get more followers.
If you have any questions or tools I haven’t mentioned, please leave a comment or send me a message through the contact from and we can talk more about your questions.
Due to length of this article I have decided to add another section going into more detail on how I follow and unfollow people using Twitter. I will also talk more about Twitter Dummy and how it has helped with Twitter.
Image Source: biz02
Image Source: Renjith Krishnan
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