Automate your Contractor Twitter Activity with these free tools
Twitter is a great social network to reach out to millions of friends and customers. With Twitter, you can take your contracting business to a whole new level and boost your bottom line. However, to retain your precious followers, you’ll have to be active on Twitter. Not tweeting regularly can cost you some followers for your business. This is where it becomes challenging for most contractors who start a contractor twitter campaign. Staying up all day tweeting at people may cost you precious time you ought to spend bidding jobs or calling prospects. Also, when you have the time to tweet at someone, they may not have the time for you. This is where automation comes in. With the right automation tool, you can tweet at anyone at your convenience, night or day. Furthermore, your followers will be more engaged with frequent updates about your business activities. In this article, we shall list four tools which you can use to automate your Twitter activity. All tools listed in this article have a free plan. Nevertheless, you can still automate your Twitter Activity with these for free.
Buffer
Buffer is a popular tool for automating twitter activities. This tool has a free plan. With the free plan of this tool, you can add tweets to queue, schedule tweets, and shorten URLs. You can connect up to three social media accounts of any combination. That is to say that if you have three Twitter handles, you can automate all of them using Buffer. Furthermore, if you are having social media accounts other than Twitter, you can automate them with Buffer free plan provided they don’t exceed three. A con of using buffer free plan is the ‘upgrade now’ prompt they send to their users. However, Buffer has reduced the number of upgrade prompts it sends to its free users making it less intrusive.
SocialOomph
Unlike the other automation tools, SocialOomph gives you the ability to connect up to five Twitter handles. Also, it has more basic features when compared to big names like Buffer, and Hootsuite. With SocialOomph you can schedule tweets, track keywords, shorten URLs, save drafts and view mentions. In addition you also get secure access to your Twitter account without a password. Also, if you intend to clean up tweets on your Twitter handle without losing followers, you’ll find the Purge feature of SocialOomph very useful.
HootSuite
HootSuite is very common among different users of social media for business. The software giant boasts of having over 800 of the top 1000 companies on Fortune’s list as its major users. With Hootsuite free plan, you can manage up to three social media profiles. Also, you get free basic analytics of your tweets and ability to schedule up to thirty messages. The major con of Hootsuite is the limit on the number of messages it can schedule. Despite the drawback, you can spare some time doing other tasks while HootSuite automates your Twitter activity.
Twitter Lists
Though this does not have the great scheduling features of third-party automation tools, they are instrumental. With Twitter lists, you can categorize your followers into lists. For example, you can group your followers by their characteristics such as companies, business, partners friends, etc. The advantage of Twitter lists is that it helps you in treating your followers according to how meaningful they are to you. With Twitter lists, you can keep your followers engaged with the right content which will help you in generating more leads for your business. Furthermore, you can monitor what people say about your business on Twitter, and see the kind of content they publish.
IFTTT
If you are a tech person or someone conversant with programming languages, you must have used the if statement. IFTTT does what IF statements do in programming languages – take a decision based on a condition. The acronym IFTTT stands for If This Then That. It is a way of automating tasks by conditioning your activities. With IFTTT, you can make your Twitter account as dynamic as your followers.
The first thing you should do with IFTTT is to make sure anything you do on any other platform, automatically gets shared to your Twitter profile as well. For example, if you make a Facebook post, IFTTT will automatically share that post to your Twitter feed as well. Same holds true for Google, Instagram, Pinterest etc. Don’t worry about over sharing in your Twitter feed, trust me there is no way you are going to over share to your followers, Twitter isn’t a platform where people will unfollow you if you share too much. As long as you’re not a total spammer, you should be fine sharing up to 20 or 30 times a day. For more information on how much you should post, check out our article. . . .
Dlvr.It
All of the above tools listed do well in automating predefined tasks, such as tweets, podcasts, video, etc. However, the challenge is not just posting content on Twitter. Instead, the primary challenge is finding the right content to post on Twitter. This is what most handlers of social media spend most of their social media time on. Worst still, when they manage to create content, they do it wrong. The use of the wrong keywords and irrelevant content do you no good for your business on Twitter. However, with the Dlvr.it at your possession, these issues are laid to rest. Dlvr.it scans your RSS feeds for the latest articles and help you post them on Twitter. You spend less time researching what to write on and how to write it. Also, you’ll get the schedule feature that comes with top automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite. The free version allows you to connect up to 3 individual platforms with all the features above. This means that you can connect three different Twitter handles and automate them. You also have up to ten daily posts per a social account, connect up to five sites or news feeds and 30 minutes feed update.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is another free automation tool that comes with the Twitter social media platform. It helps you in organizing, build collections, track lists, searches, and do more. Sometimes people don’t consider it as an automation tool, but in reality, it is. Most times, Twitter marketing involves searching for the right conversations, monitoring keywords, and following your lists. Doing this task without TweetDeck can be such a bore. However, with TweetDeck, the task becomes much more comfortable and very efficient. All you have to do is to create a column for each Twitter list or keywords you’re interested in.
ManageFlitter
Other than promoting your Twitter profile, following the right kind of people is a great way to increase your followers. In fact, it is a fast way of getting followers without spending much on advertising and promotion. But this task is difficult without an automation tool. How will you know which account to follow or unfollow? How can you get a list of the followers of your competitors? That’s what ManageFlitter does for you. Simply put, ManageFlitter helps you find the right account to connect to and find accounts to unfollow. The best part is that it detects fake or spammy accounts that are not worth connecting to. So come to think of it. If you gave this task to a human, wouldn’t it be very burdensome? Of course, it is. Also, the detection of spammy accounts is inaccurate when compared to the use of automation tools.
A word of caution. . .
Just because you have automation tools doesn’t imply that you should make your Twitter handle a robot. Note that automation tools don’t have a human feeling. They can’t read the emotions of real people. When you turn your Twitter handle to a robot, your followers will easily detect it and get irritated. To this end, you should try to add some human flavor to the mix of your Twitter activities. Here are some ways you can go about it.
Avoid using Auto replies: Yes, many organizations do that to their followers, and you know what? They get irritated by what they see and unfollow the Twitter handle. If you’re going to use your Twitter handle to respond to queries from your customers, then avoid auto-replies. Instead, you may choose to hire someone who will be dedicated to your Twitter handle. This way, you’ll be able to serve your customers better.
Don’t post Too many Tweets at a Time: Twitter displays tweet on a user timeline as they are posted. So if your followers see up to ten tweets in a row on their timeline, then you should get ready to lose that follower. Why? Because they will read it as another robot spamming them with too many Tweets. Instead, you should make use of the schedule feature of the tools mentioned above.
Create some time for your followers: Your Twitter activity shouldn’t sound too robotic, there should be some human taste to it. Try to create some time for your esteemed followers. Create some live podcasts and video sessions to engage your followers. This way, you’ll get more engagements and more leads for your business.
The key to having a successful Twitter account is to automate the mundane tasks so you can spend the time you do have on personalizing your feed and interacting with your followers. I hear it all the time how excited a contractor is when he gets his first lead from Twitter. “I didn’t think it was possible!” is the most common response. However, as with anything, consistent effort in building your Twitter account will yield good, quality, steady leads in perpetuity as long as you put in the effort up front. Automating as many tasks as possible is the way to make this feasible without feeling overwhelmed.