3 Tools to Optimise your Twitter Account
It’s been a bit of a hectic few weeks for me, a quick trip to the UK for my best friends hen weekend and then we bought a puppy (click for a photo) last week and he’s been quite a handful. As well as that I have been trying to keep up with the Author Blog Challenge, luckily I have all the content in my inbox (author interviews) and it’s just a case of copy and pasting and a bit of formatting to get them posted each day. So this blog post has been a long time coming… I also have a Social Media Clinic email to do this week as well as keep up with the eBook formatting work I have had in from clients.
Do you regularly optimise your Twitter account?
This blog post came to me this morning while I was doing my weekly Twitter clean out. I don’t schedule it each week, but usually on a Monday or Tuesday I spend some time optimising my Buffer account and clearing out some Twitter friends/followers.
I like to know where I am with my social media profiles, especially on Twitter. This last week my stats from SocialBro told me I had over 60 new follows and 30 unfollows. By checking out all the stats in one place means you can easily synchronise the information each week and get an overview of how well your Twitter account is running and also check out your new followers too.
Everyone has unfollows each week, I have learnt not to let it bother me, partly because I know that some Twitter users use lists to follow people to try and cut down their newsfeed. Also because I am not sure if Twitter has sorted out the random unfollowing people problem yet. I wrote a blog post about it some time ago – Is Twitter Unfollowing People Randomly? – are you still experiencing this?
How do I optimise my Twitter account?
Buffer
This morning my first stop was Buffer, I keep receiving emails telling me my Buffer (for Twitter) is full – I have 54 spaces, so quite a lot really but just lately I seem to be finding some great content to share. I’ve also set-up some RSS feed actions in Ifttt.com which means some blog posts are being sent directly to Buffer, so if these bloggers write a lot of posts then my Buffer gets full pretty quickly. So this morning I have been through the posts and deleted some which I don’t feel are relevant for my followers, as well as editing some to make them look prettier. The other thing I have done is add an extra tweet per day in the hope it won’t fill up so quickly. That means during the week I have 6 tweets from Buffer and at the weekend just 3.
My next stop was SocialBro to check out my new follows and unfollows. First job is to see who has unfollowed me, in general if someone unfollows me I will unfollow back. There are some exceptions though, I won’t unfollow anyone who I have dealt with in my business or if I genuinely enjoy their tweets. As I said before, I don’t know why they unfollow but those are my rules and I try and stick by them.
I then check out my ‘inactive friends’, the default setting is they haven’t tweeted for 3 months, but I always change this to 15 days. If anyone pops up in the results who hasn’t tweeted in the last 15 days I use the rules above. Some I leave and wait to see if they start tweeting again, and if they appear again the following week then I will unfollow.
I check out my new followers next, but I tend to do this on a daily basis anyway so I can quickly follow people back if I am interested in them. In SocialBro I tend to just have a quick look to see if I’ve overlooked anyone.
The last thing I do is to click on the ‘best time to tweet’ button, it takes a couple of hours to appear but then I can synchronise it with Buffer. It optimises the times my Buffer tweets are sent out and this is a great tool.
I check this less regularly, because I tend to pop on here every couple of days to add a new scheduled update. Every few weeks I check my queue reservoirs for any outdated updates and whether I can jazz some of them up a bit, or change them slightly. I also have a quick look at my stats in here, to see how many of my updates are being retweeted.
Others
I use various apps on a daily basis and I thought they deserved a mention here as well, not necessarily for optimising purposes but just to double check I’m not missing any mentions on Twitter. I use Twitter on the web once a day to check out new followers (as well as the iPhone app). I have just invested in a SocialCRM called Nimble which I will write about soon separately, at the moment I have all my social media accounts in this as well as my email. I also use Tweetdeck for instant pop-ups of retweets and mentions (for my account and client accounts).
Hopefully there will be just one single app I can do all of the above in, wouldn’t that be good?!!
I’d love to know what everyone else uses and if I’m missing out on any similar apps.
