Ah, social media. Social media is one of my favorite things in the world. I’m fascinated by it! But, boy, can it be a time suck, amiright? In fact, one of the best things I ever did for my business was put systems in place so that I very rarely am ever actually on social media. This means that I have a ton more time to actually create content and engage with my audience (you know…the important stuff!). Those are things that I consider to be much more crucial than wasting time doing stuff like scheduling tweets and creating graphics. So, my tip for you today? Figure out a way to start taking social media off your plate. And one of the best places to start is by automating your Twitter marketing!

For me, Twitter was a platform that used to take up so much of my time. I felt that it was important for me to be active there, so I was constantly liking people’s tweets, retweeting, and responding to messages. It started to get insane. Eventually, I realized that it simply wasn’t the best use of my time.

That being said, social media, including Twitter, is very important to an online business.

And regardless of whether or not you personally like to use Twitter, I still think that your business should have an active presence there. Why? Just check out some of these 2017 stats from Hootsuite:

• 66% of Twitter users have discovered a new small business on Twitter
• 94% of Twitter users plan to purchase from the small businesses they follow
• 69% have purchased from a small business in the past because of something they saw on Twitter
• 75% of Twitter users feel better about a small business after following a business and reading its tweets
• 79% of Twitter users have retweeted from a small business
• 38% of Twitter users have retweeted a new product or service update from a small business
• 84% of shoppers on Twitter use the platform to search for deals, product reviews, and gift ideas
•  63.5 % of social media managers listed Twitter as one of their top social media platforms in terms of return on investment

So, if you were thinking that maybe you’d just skip out on Twitter…you might want to rethink that! Twitter can be extremely effective for interacting with your audience and creating brand awareness.

But, as important as it is, I still have to admit that taking full advantage of the platform involves a lot of work. There’s tons of tasks that need to be completed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. (Some of which you probably didn’t even realize you should be doing!) When done right, though, Twitter can literally take up to 10 hours per week. Crazy, right??

So I’m sure you’re all dying to know. How can you make use of the amazing power of Twitter without spending all day on there?

Automate it!

By streamlining your process and outsourcing certain pieces of it, you can start automating your Twitter marketing. This will allow you to reap the benefits of having an active presence on Twitter without it being a time-suck!

How to Save Time by Automating Your Twitter Marketing

If you’re struggling with time management in your business (seriously, though, who isn’t?), here’s a tip. One of the best ways to save time is to automate or outsource your social media. Like we talked about above, social media one of the most time-consuming tasks that you have in your business. But the good news is that it’s also one of the easiest to take off your plate.

I already taught you guys how to grow your Pinterest on autopilot in a previous post. So this time around, I’m going to focus on teaching you all about automating your Twitter marketing.

There’s basically two main ways to start automating your Twitter marketing. You can either (a) streamline or (b) outsource. Ideally, you should try to do a bit of both.

Streamlining Your Twitter Marketing

Let’s start with a few tips on how to streamline.

Creating a Posting Schedule

One of the very first things you need to do is decide on your Twitter posting schedule.

Typically I suggest to use the 80/20 rule. That means that 80% of the content you share should be from someone else. The other 20% should be content from your own business.

Since the lifespan of a Tweet is only 18 minutes, it’s crucial to post multiple times per day, or even per hour. I typically recommend that you do between 10-20 tweets every day. (But you could certainly do up to 30 if you wanted to!)

Personally, I like to create my schedule on a weekly basis, since that’s how often I come out with new blog posts.

So instead of applying the 80/20 rule to each day, I instead apply it to the week as a whole. That means, on Mondays (when my new posts come out), I do a bunch of promotional tweets that day. This helps to get the word out about my brand-new post. But then the rest of the week is much more focused on other people’s content.

This allows me to actively promote my new content while at the same time maintaining the crucial balance of content that keeps me from coming across as spammy.

Related Post: Exactly How to Promote Your New Blog Post

When you’re working on planning out what content you will share each day or each week, it’s a good idea to think about variety. There’s a few different types of things you can post on Twitter, so it’s good to have a mixture.

For example, a typical day of your tweets might look like:

• 2 tweets about your most recent blog post
• 1 tweet about an old blog post
• 1 video that will resonate with your audience
• 4 retweets from people in your niche
• 1 tweet about a lead magnet
• 1 quote that will resonate with your audience
• 4 tweets promoting someone else’s content
• 1 click-to-tweet from someone else’s blog post

It may seem like a lot, but the idea is just to get a list of a few different types of tweets you’ll post. Once you have that, you can simply spend an hour or two filling up those categories with content. Then you’re set for a whole month!

Curating Your Tweet Content

“Content curation” basically just refers to the process of filling up those tweet categories you just came up with in the previous section.

Promoting Your Own Content

The first step of content curation is to take care of your own business’ content first. This is the 20% part of the 80/20 rule, and I like to refer to it as the “promo content.”

Related Post: How to Create a Super Effective Editorial Calendar

I’ve found that the best way to do this is to make use of the good ol’ fashioned spreadsheet. Simply create a spreadsheet that has a list of every single blog post you have on your site. (You might also want to make a separate one just for lead magnets/opt-ins/paid products, etc.) Then, in a separate column, create 3-5 individual tweets for each piece of your content.

Depending on your business, it might be a good idea to vary the copy in each tweet to try to appeal to different segments of your audience. Or, you can keep the copy the same, but switch out different hashtags. (We’ll talk more about hashtags later.)

Sharing by Retweeting

Once you have all of the tweets written for your own business’s content, it’s time to curate content for the other 80% — stuff from other people. I like to call this “share content.” A great way to save time creating your share content is to allocate half of it for retweets from other Twitter users.

A great way to save even more time with retweets is to create a Twitter list of your favorite people. When it’s time to schedule your retweets, simply scroll through that list and you’ll easily be able to find great stuff to retweet.

You can also create a list around a particular hashtag. You can use that list for retweets, to find new relevant accounts, or as a method of content curation!

Sharing Other People’s Blog Posts

The other half of your shared content should be tweets that you’ve written yourself about other people’s blog posts. The trick to for this is to have an easy way to find the content that you’re going to write tweets for. I really like using Feedly.

Feedly is an RSS reader that allows you to quickly and easily scroll through lists of posts from multiple different people all at once. Simply create a big list of all your favorite bloggers or news sources in your niche. Once you have that, it’s super easy to quickly find great content to write tweets about.

Choosing a Scheduler

Once you have all your content curated for each of your categories for the whole month, it’s time to schedule it! Personally, I use a combination of Buffer and SmarterQueue.

SmarterQueue is awesome, because you can actually take those categories you created and use them inside SmarterQueue. Then, all you have to do is set up a weekly schedule so that it knows what content to post at what time of day, and it will automatically take care of everything else for you!

Their content recycling feature allows you to reuse tweets multiple times. Since the lifespan of a tweet is so short, your audience won’t notice if you repeat the same tweet a few times in one month. So, instead of having to come up with 4 unique “share content” tweets for every day of the month (120 tweets), you can set it to post each tweet multiple times. Even if you only have it repeat each tweet twice, that reduces the number of tweets you need to write down to only 60 per month. Awesome, right??

I also use Buffer in addition to SmarterQueue to take care of my retweets. Unfortunately, SmarterQueue does not yet have the capability to schedule retweets in their system, but it’s super easy to do that with Buffer. And luckily, Buffer is only $10/month!

Hashtags

I told you I’d come back to this! Hashtags are a great way to get your content seen by other people who are interested in similar topics. Basically, within a tweet, you want to use 1-3 hashtags (don’t put them all at the end, Twitter doesn’t like this) that are related to what you’re talking about. So when other people are browsing Twitter by hashtag (I do this all the time, personally!), your tweets will pop up in the list of people who used that particular hashtag.

Here’s an example of what a good tweet with hashtags looks like:

Now that you know what hashtags are and how to use them, the next step is to figure out which ones to use. Using the right hashtags (and not just any old hashtag) is a crucial component to automating your Twitter marketing. Especially when combined with the tweet recycling feature of SmarterQueue, your tweets will be showing up consistently, which is great visibility for your account.

One way to discover good hashtags to use is to simply observe what others are doing. Follow other active accounts in your niche and see which hashtags they are using. If they have a large following, they are probably using decent hashtags. So start using those same ones in your own tweets!

Personally, I like to keep a running hashtag list that I simply have saved in a Google Doc for whenever I need to write new tweets.

Another way to find good hashtags to use is to use a hashtag searching tool. My personal favorite is RiteTag, and I always use it whenever I am writing tweets for myself or my clients. RiteTag has some other features on their site, but their hashtag search database is a totally free service.

I love using their tool to search for hashtags, because it’s so extremely helpful. I simply go in there and search something general, like #healthcoach and immediately they give me a ton of great options to use in my health coach-related tweets. They have popular hashtags separated by category, so that you can choose the best ones to use.

If you click “View Stats” next to each of their suggestions, there’s even more information. (And this is all for free!)

Improving Your Twitter Stats + Engagement

This is probably the section of the blog post that you will be most interested in! If you already have a Twitter account and are looking to uplevel it, you should be focused on improving your stats and engagement. That’s one of the most important parts of automating your Twitter marketing.

What’s interesting about growth, though, is that a lot of the most important work can be done upfront, and then as you continue on automating your Twitter marketing in terms of scheduling, etc., this growth will start to organically build.

So what are those things that you’ll need to do upfront?

Tips on How to Grow Your Twitter Account:

Create Twitter-optimized graphics for each of your blog posts.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but you may be surprised by how many people don’t do this. Tweets with images perform much better than tweets without images, so keep that in mind when you’re scheduling out content! Even when you’re posting curated content, you should always try to use their Twitter-optimized graphics with the tweet (if they have them).

According to Sprout Social, here are some Twitter image guidelines:

• Tweet image minimum size: 440 x 220 pixels (appears in stream collapsed at 506 x 253 pixels on desktop)
• Maximum file size of 5 MB for photos
• Profile photo: square (minimum 400×400 pixels)
• Cover/header photo: 1500×500 pixels

Here’s an example of a good Twitter-optimized graphic:

Keep in mind that Twitter sometimes crops or “collapses” photos depending on what device a person is using. So when you’re creating your graphics, do a test tweet first. Then check it across multiple devices to make sure it’s displaying how you want it to.

What I do for my own Twitter images is just make sure that the focus point (typically the title of my blog post) is horizontally centered and a bit smaller than I’d make it normally. This allows for Twitter to crop out some of the edges while still making sure you can see the important part of the graphic — the title.

Related Post: How to Brand Your Social Media Graphics

Add click-to-tweets to all of your blog posts.

This is something that I’ve admittedly dropped the ball when it comes to my own posts. While I sometimes use click-to-tweets (commonly abbreviated as “CTT”), I also sometimes totally forget! Right now I’m working on going back through all of my old blog posts and updating them to include new CTT blurbs.

The best part is that they’re super simple to implement, and they can go a long way to help in automating your Twitter marketing.

If you’re not sure what a CTT even is, here’s an example of one in a blog post from Brittany Berger on time management:

The best way to add these to your posts on WordPress is to use a plugin like CoSchedule’s Click to Tweet plugin (that’s what I use!).

I also use the Basic Click to Tweet tool for whenever I want to create a CTT not for use in a blog post (like on a Thank You page where there’s a button that says “tweet about this!”).

If you’re on Squarespace, Brand It Girl has an awesome blog post tutorial on 2 Ways to Add Click to Tweets to Your Squarespace Blog Posts.

Some of the plugins do this for you automatically, but a key tip would be to make sure that both your Twitter handle and the link to your blog post are part of the CTT. That way when someone tweets it, (a) you’ll know and can retweet/thank them, and (b) people who see that tweet can click back to your account or the blog post.

I typically will test the CTT in an incognito window after creating it just to double-check that it’s all working and looking correctly.

And while we’re on this topic, always double check stuff like this! It takes two seconds. And if you end up finding a problem, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and energy! Even if just one small thing like this goes wrong, automating your Twitter marketing is going to be that much more difficult. You want the whole process to run as smoothly as possible. Making it easy for people to share your stuff guarantees that they will do it more often and appreciate you for it!

Add social share buttons to your website.

Again, kind of a no-brainer, but it’s a really important part of automating your Twitter marketing! Make sure that there are multiple opportunities on the page of every blog post for people to share it on their social media channels.

Typically, the best spots to put these share buttons are:

1. At the top of the blog post, usually underneath the featured image.
2. On the side of the blog post (it should scroll with you as you read the post).
3. At the end of the blog post, before the comment section.

My favorite tool to use for this is the SumoMe WordPress plugin. You can easily configure and personalize the social sharing bar, and I love that I can even tell it not to display on certain pages of my site. You can also use SumoMe on Squarespace, too.

Whichever social sharing tool you choose, make sure that (especially for Twitter) when it generates the tweets for your blog posts that it is inputting both the title of the post and your handle.

Sometimes when you click on social sharing buttons on someone’s site, it just opens up a tweet that simply has a link and nothing else. People are much more likely to share your post if there is a pre-written tweet all set up for them. Then, they can just add their own personalization to it, if they want to. Small fixes like this around your site can really help you start automating your Twitter marketing. It all adds up, and trust me — you’ll eventually start to notice more and more people sharing your content.

Tag an influencer or a company.

Whenever I feature someone in a post, I reach out to them via email to let them know that they have been featured!

I basically just give them a heads up and the link to the blog post in case they want to check it out. It’s nice to also include a pre-written tweet so that they can easily share it with their audience if they are interested.

I will also do a shout-out in a promotional tweet of that post. For example, for this post I might say something like “In this week’s blog post, I show how @CoSchedule’s click to tweet #Wordpress plugin is a great #marketing tool to grow your #Twitter account + increase engagement! [BLOG POST LINK].” ‘

Another good thing to do is use their hashtag if they have one.

If it’s a big company, they probably have a hashtag and someone who monitors the hashtag. So I would recommend posting a second tweet, with one small change: “In this week’s blog post, I show how #coschedule’s click to tweet #Wordpress plugin is a great #marketing tool to grow your #Twitter account + increase engagement! [BLOG POST LINK].”

Doing the shout-out both with their handle and the hashtag gives me a better likelihood of them seeing the tweet. And then hopefully they’re retweet it on their own account!

When you feature people and they end up sharing your post, you will get a ton more exposure than if you just tweeted from your own account. Their followers will see that they gave you a shout-out, so you’ll probably get an influx of new followers from this! That being said, while it’s a great tactic for automating your Twitter marketing, it’s important not to overuse it. Make sure that when you feature people, it’s genuine. And don’t be too spammy when asking them to share the post.

Participate in Twitter chats.

I think that these have become a bit less popular since I first started my business, but Twitter chats can be a great tool if used correctly. Basically, a Twitter chat is when a bunch of people use a specific hashtag and chat real-time for 1 hour! They’re not really a good tool for automating your Twitter marketing, as you have to show up live. But, often, the benefits of doing so outweigh the hassle.

If you want to know more about participating in Twitter chats, this article from Social Media Week has an article about the 5 Keys to a Successful Twitter Chat.

Here’s a list of Twitter chats you might want to join:

• #MillennialTalk
• #SMTLive
• #BufferChat
• #ContentWritingChat
• #TwitterSmarter
• #SoulfulPRHour
• #StartUpHour
• #OrcaChat
• #HootChat

Take a free Twitter course or challenge.

My friend Stacey Myers is a Twitter genius! She has a free challenge that claims to explode your tweet reach! Sign up here. Use her tips to start integrating growth tactics into the process you’re building for automating your Twitter marketing.

Time Management

One thing that I’ve found can really help you get the most out of automating your Twitter marketing is time management. A lot of the Twitter-related tasks you need to do happen on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

Making sure you keep up with that schedule is a great way to ensure that your automation runs smoothly. It also guarantees that your account is active and updated on a consistent basis. And that goes a long way if you’re looking to grow your following.

Here’s the calendar I use to keep my Twitter account up to date and consistently automated! {Download below}

Outsourcing Your Twitter Marketing

The final tip I’m going to give you for automating your Twitter marketing is to outsource some of the work.

At some point in your business, you simply won’t have enough time to take care of everything all by yourself. That calendar of tasks you (hopefully) just downloaded is eventually going to become too much to take care of. You’ll start slipping, pushing tasks back, and your Twitter account is going to suffer for it. If you feel like you’re at that point, where you simply just do not have time, the best thing to do is let someone else take care of it for you!

Luckily, I’ve created a reliable system for automating your Twitter marketing that I use in my own business. It works like a charm! So now I’m giving you the chance to have me take over your account and repeat that for you! (At a crazy affordable price.)

Since I started focusing more on my Twitter account, I’ve been able to grow it to 6,500 followers, and I get new traffic from it all the time. And for those of my followers who use Twitter more than other platforms, they love to see that I’m active there!

Does this sound pretty awesome? I’m thinking it probably does! If you’re ready to get started, you can check out more details by clicking the button below.