Simple Twitter best practice for new folks

When I started using twitter as a B2B marketer – different than personally, I wondered what to do. Here is my daily routine to keep it simple.

First I use HootSuite, which makes this much easier. HootSuite is a free Twitter management service. It allows you to:

• manage multiple Twitter accounts and
• support multiple Twitter users
• see statistics on links in your Twitter posts which is a good proxy for how much you are being read
• import RSS feeds to your Twitter accounts
• create column windows for a variety things including mentions, direct messages
• search twitter and create a column window that will show the current search when you open HootSuite.
• schedule tweets for later delivery

Two search terms I have windows for are #BSM (for Business Service Management) and #ITIL (for IT Information Library).

First I have our blogs feed into our Twitter account using the RSS feature. As a side note, I also use the Facebook application to link my Facebook account to my Twitter account, which means a blog post turns into a tweet turns into a Facebook post a three for one.

My normal routine is:

1. open HootSuite
2. check the mentions window to see if I need to reply to anyone who sent a message
3. similarly check the direct messages window
4. check the #BSM search window, read tweets to see if anything is worth retweeting. In particular I look for ones with URLs. I review the URL to see the article.  I admit, I take the long form of the URL in the tweet and reshrink it with HootSuite’s tool. I do this because that is how HootSuite tracks –see picture of stats below.
5. do the same for #ITIL
6. I do all tweets twice, once early morning Pacific time (I’m in California) this cover Europe and the US east coast and again last afternoon Pacific time, this covers west coast of US and Asia Pacific. This tip comes from Tim O’Reily’s (@timoreilly) webinar on Twitter.

Of course, I do original tweets also but this process really helps when I not feeling inspired.

That’s it. I do this usually in the morning, at lunch and/or end of day – usually only one of those unless it’s a slow day.

Let me know your Twitter best practices.

HootSuite search window

HootSuite statistics window – you can also get region breakdown and per Tweet stats