If you’ve mastered the basics of Twitter, (by following my Taming Twitter course or on your own) and built it into your daily routine it’s probably time to take stock. It may also be a great time to plan your next phase, to move yourself up through intermediate to advanced level skills, if you want to increase your returns.
Here are six tips and ideas to help you increase the benefits you gain from Twitter.
I’ll also post tips about your content plan and twitter housekeeping, so check for other posts on the ‘Hosted Apps and Tools’ blog.
The six tips are inevitably based on apps and tools. There are countless Twitter Tools available but here are some I’m finding very useful:
KLOUT – assesses your influence online. Scores of 75 are exceptional, and I’d say that above 40 is a great achievement. Below 40 and there’s room for improvement if you want to get real benefit from Twitter. Register with www.klout.com , add your Facebook and LinkedIn details then track your score. See also my post on ideas to improve your influence.
TwitCleaner – one part of this tool assesses your profile and suggests improvements, or flags up areas or activity that might be compromising your reputation. The other side is covered in my post on Twitter Housekeeping.
Hootsuite – lets you manage 5 Twitter or other Social Media Accounts for free. With Hootsuite I can easily post to different accounts and set up different streams. I can also monitor Direct and @ messages and respond, to develop dialogue and relationships.
To help to prioritise the incoming tweet streams here are two tips that I use:
- Filtering my main stream by Klout ie. set at 40 to remove the noise of Tweets from low influence people. It also provides a source of ReTweets of people with higher influence.
- Setting up Lists for Friends, Specialists etc. and then a Stream per list so I can periodically check per topic.
Paper.li – lets you create a daily or weekly online newspaper that is fed by a Twitter list you manage. It’s a very time-effective way to curate information and publish it. Read your own paper and let paper.li highlight key stories based on your interests.
Automate a Feed – you may want to ease the load by sending part of your content through automatically. Using Google Alerts and TwitterFeed or FeedBurner it is fairly easy to achieve this. Use with care to maintain content quality and ratio of manual and automatic content.
Go Mobile – I’ve added the Twitter App to my Blackberry so I can access the Twitter on the move, both via the Twitter App and Direct Tweets appear in my email feed too. Similar function will be available on other Smartphones.
Take an hour or so every month to review your account, and the tools you use, to improve the return you get from the time you spend on Twitter.
I hope that one or two of these tips prove really helpful to you.
Add a comment below to let me know how you use Twitter.
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