Tweet Automation

by Start A New Business Ideas on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | No Comments

I have people calling me at home, late at night, because they just can’t wait for the follow up to “I hit 2000 Twitter Followers Since Last Wendsday!”

I know you have been waiting, so here is Tweet Automation..
By Kevin Needham

It is one thing to have followers and something completly different to engage with them.

By this I mean, we want interaction. no use if the whole group is sending spammy messages back and forth and that is what I see happening most on Twitter. No one reads them, no one replies.

To counter that, I figured there must be a way to send targeted tweets to people and there must be a way to do it without having to be on my computer all day.

There must be a way to automate my tweets, but still make them valuable to the followers.

I headed over to google Alerts and I set up alerts based on the keywords that apply to my market. In this case, I’m wanting others to follow me as I start online businesses, so I set up an alert that is tracking all blogs, video and news related to “Business Startups”

I then take my RSS feed url, (found by clicking “view in google reader” and then viewing the source of the page) and I opened an account over at TwitterFeed.com

Relax, all these accounts are free.

At TwitterFeed.com I logged in, created a new feed, and pasted in the URL of the RSS feed I got from Google Alerts. I entered and validated my Twitter account information.

The one last thing I needed was an account at bit.ly, which is a URL shortening service. It integrates with TwitterFeed, so when the post is made to your twitter account, the URL gets shortened and saves you some space on the 140 character limit set by Twitter.

I opened a bit.ly account, and returned to Twitterfeed and entered the required data. I set the tweets to be no more than 2 per hour, and to just include the titles.

Then I went for a coffee.

I came back.

In an hour and a half, Twitterfeed had made 3 posts for me to my twitter account.

Now bit.ly is not just a URL shortening service, it is also tracking clicks, how many, their orgin, the time etc. So I was able to see that of the 3 posts, one had 7, one had 11 and one had 13 clicks. All in all, I generated 23 clicks from my Twitter posts in an hour and a half.

These clicks proved to me that my tweets were getting recognized.

so, I have engaged my followers.

Unfortunately, these clicks are not landing on my blog where I can monitize them, instead, I like to refer to them as “Relationship Clicks” They are clicks, going out to the article sources however I’m the one who sent them to my followers, so hopefully they remember me when I send the additional tweets asking them to visit my site. They are relationship building clicks.

Time will tell and I’m working on ways to monitize this traffic so stay tuned for “Twitter Payday” in the next post.

You just got to, got to, follow me on twitter