How to be on Twitter 24/7 Without Being on Twitter 24/7

By Iola Goulton

This week I'm going to talk about how to automate your Twitter account so you’re being a good Twitter citizen.

Yes, this will require a little time to set up. 

But it really is set-it-and-forget-it. Mostly.

Here are the main tools I use:

CrowdFire (previously JustUnfollow)

This tool is for managing Twitter followers. Twitter has rules about how many accounts you can follow, and the basic aim is to ensure you follow roughly the same number of accounts as follow you, so keeping your follower/following ratio close to 1:1. Tools like CrowdFire allow you to identify which accounts you follow that don't follow you back, so you can Unfollow these people and best manage your following/follower ratio.

The free version of CrowdFire allows you to follow up to 50 accounts per day, and unfollow up to 100 (well, these are my limits. Your limits might be lower if you have less than 5,000 followers).

The paid version allows you more follows and unfollows, and allows you to connect Instagram as well. I've just upgraded on a month-by-month basis, mostly to manage my Instagram followers. I haven't decided if I'll make this a permanent investment yet. It might depend on whether I get to keep the USD 5.99 promotional price, or whether I'll have to pay the USD 9.99 full price.

RoundTeam

I'm on the free plan, which allows me 200 tweets per month. I’ve set it up so I’m retweeting 5-6 tweets per day from a List (the @ACWriters list of ACW members). Every time someone on the @ACWriters list tweets, Roundteam put that tweet into a “bucket”, then tweets one post an hour between midnight and 6am (New Zealand time).

Paid plans start at USD 10 per month. 

These allow you to connect more than one Twitter account, and to have more tweets per month. The paid plans also remove the promotional tweets (at the moment, for every 50 tweets I send, RoundTeam will send one automated Tweet from me extolling the virtues of their service).

SocialJukebox (previously TweetJukebox)

You all know what a jukebox is: in the old days, it had a bunch of 45s and you could select which song you wanted from the playlist (for the younger readers: a 45 is a record with only one song on each side). They also had a random play function, and that is the concept behind Social Jukebox.

You load a virtual jukebox up with tweets, and SocialJukebox sends them randomly at predetermined intervals. 

So, for example, you could have a jukebox for old blog posts that you tweet each Thursday using the #tbt (throwback Thursday) hashtag. Yes, you have to load the posts into the relevant jukebox, but it’s a once-and-done thing: once you’ve loaded a post, it will be in that jukebox until you delete it. If I was going to post self-promotional tweets, I’d create them in SocialJukebox, then set it to post. Not too often—I wouldn’t want my Twitter stream to become all about me (the general guideline is to make no more than 20% of your posts about you).

SocialJukebox was previously known as TweetJukebox, and it just offered Tweets. The new version also posts to Facebook and LinkedIn, although I don’t use those options. Yet. (Mostly because while I don’t mind seeing Tweets repeated, I’m not a fan of seeing the same Facebook post over and over. And if it annoys me, it’s reasonable to expect it will annoy my followers as well). So I have to work out an effective sharing strategy.

Thank You Tweets

But the handy feature of SocialJukebox is that it automatically sends out thank you Tweets each Friday—an @mention and thank you to up to 50 people who have retweeted or mentioned you during the preceeding week. It’s always polite to say thank you, and this feature makes it easy.

I am currently on the basic paid plan for Social Jukebox. 

This gives me more Jukeboxes and thank you tweets to 100 people. I paid USD 120 for a year, but the prices are about to go up (to reflect the move from just supporting Twitter, to also supporting Facebook and LinkedIn). Even so, the new price of USD 24.99 per month is cheap compared to MeetEdgar, a similar tool, which is now USD 79.99 per month.

The paid plan also allows me to access three Twitter accounts ... so I can create an Australasian Christian Writers Jukebox to support and promote our blogger members.

More on that later ... 

Buffer

This requires a little more input in my part. It works in a similar way to RoundTeam and SocialJukebox in that it automatically posts content for me. The only difference is I have to load the posts in myself, and each will only post once (although there is a multiple post option). I find Buffer to be an excellent tool for posting new content or news, whereas SocialJukebox is better suited for evergreen content (content which isn’t going to date—like a book review or Bible verse meme).

I’m on Buffer’s Awesome plan, which costs me USD 10 per month.

This allows me to link up to 12 social media accounts—including Pinterest and Instagram. If I could only justify one paying for social media plan, this would be it, because it enables me to post throughout the day even when I'm out of wifi zone (as I will have been for the last three days by the time you read this).

This is also how I share many of my posts to the Australasian Christian Writers Facebook group.

No, I'm not on Twitter (or social media in general) 24/7. But tools like this allow me to be "active" even when I'm asleep.

Do you use any free or paid tools to help you manage social media? Which tools do you recommend? 

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more at www.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
Pinterest
Twitter

Four Things you Need to Know About Twitter

By Iola Goulton

Last week, I talked about why authors need to be on Twitter. I promised I'd be back this week to discuss my favourite Twitter tools ... but realised there were a couple of things I needed to cover first.

So today I’m going to give you a little background to three important Twitter topics: hashtags, mentions, and lists. And an important Twitter Tip that you'll need to remember before you even think about automating any Twitter tasks. I'll be back next week to talk about Twitter tools and automation. Promise!

About Hashtags

You’ve all seen hashtags—they’re all over social media. Things like #amreading or #amwriting or #amediting … basically, anything preceeded by a hash symbol (#, which is what Americans call a pound key).

Hashtags are important because they are how people search for topics on Twitter (and Instagram). You want to find millions of Trump haters? Search for #dumptrump. Want the latest Game of Thrones gossip and spoilers (or to vent about the current episode)? Try #gameofthrones or simply #got. Looking for a book to read? Try #amreading or #christfic #inspy or #romance or #bookworm. Using #cr4u (Clean Reads for You) will always get you a lot of retweets.

You can even invent your own hashtag, for a book, a series, a genre (like #cr4u), or an event. For example, the Omega Christian Writer’s Conference is this weekend, so I was wondering what hashtag we could use so you can all find our posts to read and share (hint hint).

#Omega2016 was my first choice, so I searched for it on Twitter. There are already a number of tweets using that hashtag—it seems to have been used by a missions trip to Thailand, and a Spanish-speaking graduating class, as well as other odd tweets. Perhaps not a good choice.

#Omega16 looks like a better option: only a handful of tweets, and none recent. Yes, it’s that easy.

And you can use the same hashtag on Facebook and Instagram (Instagram loves hashtags. Facebook … allows them, but not everyone uses them proprerly #soyougetlotsofwordsjoinedtogetherwhichdontmeanmuch.

#Omega16 it is.

About Mentions

These are called @-mentions (at-mentions), because of the @ key which comes in front of your Twitter name (so I’m @iolagoulton). If you want someone to see your Tweet, you tag them with an @-mention. This also means your tweet will show up in the Twitter feed of all their followers … so it’s not something to abuse.

But it is considered good Twitter etiquette to @-mention someone if, say, you’re linking to a blog post about them. For example:

Or if you're reviewing their book:

Or interviewing them:

(This relates to my post last week, about why you need to be on Twitter. Why would you want to miss out on knowing when people are being nice about you?)

Twitter Lists

Once you’ve been on Twitter a while, you’ll find you can’t actually scan every tweet from every person you follow (and you wouldn’t want to, especially not if some of the people you follow are the spam-every-six-minutes types). But that doesn’t mean you want to unfollow them …

Twitter lists are the answer to this dilemma. Group similar accounts into a List, and you can just review tweets from that list. Sometimes I add interesting people to a list, then find out they are tweet-every-six-minute spammers. The solution is simple: take them off the list.

(As an aside, this is why you shouldn’t be a tweet-every-six-minute spammer. It’s possible no one will notice if they follow hundreds or thousands of active accounts. But if they put you on a list, spammy behaviour is easy to spot and difficult to ignore.)

The way they achieve this annoying omniscience is through automation. They’ll use a tool to preschedule hundreds of tweets each week, each promoting themselves or their books. This behaviour gives automation a bad name.

But there is a better way to use automation. I’ll talk about that next week.

Meanwhile, here’s my big #TwitterTip (hey! See the hashtag!):

Twitter is not all about you.

If you spend any time on Twitter (or read blog posts about Twitter or other social media), you’ll come across some variation of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80:20 rule:

No more than 20% of your posts should be about you.

Most of your posts (80%, or four out of five) should be posts from or about other people, such as retweets of interesting blog posts. That is, blog posts which are interesting to your target reader … which may or may not be people like you. Not blog posts you liked because they had useful writing or editing tips (unless your target reader is a writer).

If you can focus on this 80:20 principle, focus on providing content that your readers will find interesting, you’ll get interaction with readers and you might even find you come to enjoy using Twitter.

But if you make it all about you … Yeah. You might get nothing but tumbleweeds. Not so good.

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more at www.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
Pinterest
Twitter