There is no doubt, automatically linking blog posts to Twitter is a huge time saver. However, blindly auto-tweeting is a good way to lose followers. Conversely, a smart auto tweet strategy not only saves you time but also avoids spamming your Twitter feed.
eMarketer estimates more than 52 Million people in the US use Twitter on a monthly basis. So, it makes sense to automatically Tweet blog posts to reach potential customers. Nevertheless, there is a right way and a wrong way to post your blog to Twitter.
We’ve outlined a smart auto tweet strategy that will not only help you avoid spamming but also increase followers. In general, the basic idea is to understand your audience and then deliver the right content at the right time.
1 – How to Auto Tweet Blog Posts and RSS Feeds
The recipe below will show you how to auto tweet blog posts or any RSS feed to Twitter in just a few steps. Of course, you are not limited to just your own blog RSS feed. You can also auto-tweet RSS feeds from any blogger as part of your content curation strategy.
1) Go to dlvr.it and create an account with your email + password.
2) Enter your RSS Feed URL from the Automation tab.
3) Once you have this entered, configure your Feed and click on ‘Next: Connect Socials’.
4) Under the Connect Socials screen, click on the ‘Connect New’ button.
5) Click on the Twitter icon and authorize dlvr.it to post to your Twitter account.
That’s it! Now whenever you create a new blog post, dlvr.it will automatically send your blog posts to Twitter.
Here’s what a completed dlvr.it Route looks like:
Now that you can send blog posts to Twitter, we need to add some intelligence. When creating a smart auto tweet strategy, there are a few more steps to take if you want to avoid spamming your followers.
2 – Know thy Audience
To auto-Tweet is not to Spam. Not knowing thy audience coupled with irrelevant Tweets is considered spam.
Twitter Analytics provides detailed performance stats that are not accessible by 3rd party social media analytics tools. Additionally, these stats contain a wealth of information and are available to anyone who has created a Twitter account. However, the key is to understand how to unlock this meaningful data to get the most value.
When you view your Twitter stats, ask yourself a few questions:
- How does time of day and day of the week influence the performance of your tweets? Do certain times lead to more impressions?
- What is your optimal tweet frequency? Are you burning out your audience by over-tweeting or can you stand to tweet even more than you currently do?
- Is your audience more responsive to a fun and conversational tone or more business-like, professional-sounding tweets?
- How does media perform in your tweets? Do people love videos and photos, or do they prefer text-based tweets?
- How does link placement in your tweets impact engagement?
- What kinds of calls-to-action (CTA) generate the most engagement with your audience? Are blatant CTAs more impactful, or does your audience appreciate subtlety?
I encourage you to read through this helpful guide in understanding Twitter Analytics: 3 Informative Twitter Analytics Reports With the Most Value.
For the purpose of creating our smart auto-Tweet strategy, we want to pay particular attention to Audience Insights and Audience Comparison.
The reports tell us:
- Who our audience is
- What blog post to send to Twitter
1 – Audience Insights
Click the ‘Audiences’ tab at the top of the Twitter Analytics page (see diagram below) and you’ll see detailed stats on your followers, including:
- Demographics: Gender, County, Household Income, Net Worth, Languages, Home value, Region
- Lifestyle: Interests (by category), TV genres
- Consumer Behavior: Aftermarket auto buyers types, Consumer buying styles, Consumer goods purchases
- Mobile Footprint: Wireless Carrier, Device categories
Tip: If your audience is not sufficiently large enough to provide insights, read How to Get Twitter Followers in 7 Easy Steps.
2 – Audience Comparison
The above provides me with a great level of detail on my Twitter followers. However, one of the hidden gems is the audience comparison feature.
I can compare my followers to what Twitter calls “organic audience.” Your organic audience looks like this:
Your followers + Your followers’ followers
= Your Organic Audience
For example:
If your follower retweets your content, your content is exposed to that audience of your followers = viral marketing!
In the example below, I compare my Followers to my Organic Audience.
(1): My Followers
(2): My Organic Audience
As mentioned above this comparison can be helpful to figure out what to auto tweet.
3 – Use Twitter Search to Find More of The Right Followers
Next, we need to find more followers just like the ones we have. Again, assuming we find customers who would be more interested in what we auto Tweet, plays into our smart strategy.
The first thing to remember when you grow Twitter followers is to “follow to be followed“.
In other words, this is a gentle way of saying “Hello, pleased to meet you” without being pushy. As a result, if you follow them, and if they like what they see in your Twitter feed, they’ll follow back.
Success on Twitter (and social media marketing in general) is having the right people to follow.
The purpose of Twitter Connect is to help you find people of interest much quicker than before.
The Connect tab also makes it easier to connect with your friends and family by giving you the option to automatically sync your address book.
If you have the Twitter IOS or Android app installed, look for the tab in the upper left of the screen. Click it to expose a wealth of new people to follow.
Twitter recommends people to follow based on the following:
- Who you already follow
- Tweets you like
- Popular accounts in your local area
- What’s happening in the world right now
Furthermore, this handy Twitter Search tool organizes the recommendations using the above criteria, so you know exactly why Twitter recommended someone.
***You control how good Twitter’s recommendation engine is and the results they display.
For example, let’s say own a pizza joint in San Jose, California. You want to find people who love pizza within your given geographical area. Do a Twitter Search for ‘pizza’ in your zip code (continue reading to learn how). Scroll through the Twitter Search results and like tweets.
In the long run, you’ll start to notice how Connect recommends more people in San Jose who love pizza.
To get even more out of Twitter Search, I encourage you to read: How To Use Twitter Search To Quickly Find More Happy Customers
4 – Schedule Tweets to Avoid Clumping
Scheduling Tweets can be a productivity aid when used “smartly”. Moreover, scheduling Tweets offers the flexibility to plan your message in advance and saves hours of time every week.
Generally speaking, the best time to auto Tweet is between 1 pm and 3 pm, Monday through Thursday. With that said, you will have to experiment with your audience. Review Twitter analytics to learn more about the best time to Tweet.
Not only is scheduling an important piece of a smart auto Tweet strategy but it also avoids having too many Tweets going out at the same time. One of the many reasons Twitter followers unfollow is because of ‘clumping’ – that is the rapid firing off of Tweet after Tweet after Tweet.
Auto-scheduling Tweets is how business savvy professionals build time back into their day.
Smart automation scheduling tool
Queue, by dlvr.it, is a smart social media scheduling tool. Not to mention, Queue delivers a consistent flow of perfectly timed content throughout the day to keep your Twitter audience engaged. Queue manages your Twitter feed while you are out to lunch, on vacation or just not available.
Send RSS to Twitter with Queue
Link any RSS feed to Twitter as a backup content source. With an optimized continuous stream of content, you will increase traffic, engagement and brand recognition. No clumping, no spam and not to mentioned delivered at just the right time.
5 – Find the Right Hashtags and Automatically Add to Tweets
Many studies have shown that tweets with hashtags generate up to double (if not more) user engagement.
- Increase viewership: Similar to keywords used for search optimization, hashtags help people discover your content in social. You can instantly become more visible and become part of a trending conversation.
- Build Social Followers: Hashtags help build social followers. If you are an authority on barbecuing, hashtags will help people find you within a room of desperate conversations.
- Create new customers: Find new prospects and customers. Monitor important hashtags in social and jump on relevant opportunities. For example, you could find a prospect in need of your service or discover a prospect unhappy with a competitor. Hashtags discover conversations that are happening ‘right now’ vs. keywords that will last a long time. It is important to set-up an alert within your favorite social media monitoring tool monitoring the conversations (hashtags) you want to follow.
- Branding: Hashtags can help brand your business. You can set-up a branded hashtag specific to your business. For example, if you are running a sale, you could create the hashtag #Bobs_barbeque_blowout. If you add the hashtag to your customer communications (email, twitter), your customers can follow the hashtag to stay current on your latest promotions.
- Revenue: Hashtags help you quickly determine what people are talking about so this will help guide new content decisions and create new product ideas to boost sales.
- Competition: Track your competition. See what conversations they are a part of or what people are saying about them.
With this in mind, finding the right hashtag is the first step. The last thing you want to do is spam Twitter feeds with irrelevant content because you used the wrong hashtag. Leverage popular hashtags – search for hashtags on Hashtagify
Now that you have relevant hashtags, use them to categorize your content on your blog. In WordPress for example when you create a new blog post you can also add a category.
With that said, by using dlvr.it, we can automatically turn that category tag in the RSS feed into a hashtag on Twitter!
To enable this feature on your Twitter account, you will need to access the Socials Tab.
1) Click on the Twitter account and click on the Edit icon
2) Click on the Advanced tab
3) Click on Auto Hashtag placement and choose where you would like to post your Auto Hashtags (Hashtags Before and After content are limited to 5 hashtags)
- Before Content: This will be placed between any prefixes that you have set and the content itself
- After Content: Placed between your content and any suffixes defined
- Inline: If any category tags are matched within the text, this will automatically be changed into a hashtag
4) Select the maximum number of hashtags that you would like us to generate
5) Choose how you would like blank spaces handled (either eliminate or use underscores)
6) Save, and you’re done!
Additionally, read more about other ways to automatically add hashtags to Tweets.
6 – Add Filters to Target Content
For one thing, followers will call anything irrelevant in their Twitter feed as spam. Again the goal with your auto Tweet strategy is to share the RIGHT content with your audience to avoid the perception of spam.
This tactic is where filters make the most sense. Before the auto tweet is sent, dlvr.it can share or exclude specific content based on keywords you enter.
You can filter by the following:
- Title
- Content
- Category
- Author
- Link
You can filter these categories in a number of different ways. The first selection that you must make is to filter by either ‘Match Whole Words’ or ‘Match Sequence Anywhere’. We have described these cases in more detail below:
- Match whole words: Applies filters on words/phrases only if they appear as a whole word. For instance, if filtering on the word “state”, a) “state” will trigger the filter, while b) “statement” will not.
- Match sequence anywhere: Applies filters on words/phrases if they appear anywhere in a sequence. For instance, if filtering on the word “state”, all of the following will trigger the filter: “state”, “statement”, “understated”, etc.
Once you have opted for one of these two cases, you will be asked for your filter terms. You can choose to filter by the following:
- Must contain all the terms
- Must contain any of the terms
- Ignore items that contain any of the terms
Save your filters, and now your auto tweet strategy just got that much smarter!
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Do you auto Tweet? What are the best practices you follow? We would love to hear from you.
The post 6 of the Best Ways to Auto Tweet That Will Avoid Spamming Twitter appeared first on dlvr.it blog.