If you’re serious about using Twitter, you don’t want to be an infrequent tweeter! Yes, you are busy, busy, busy, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. But you don’t have to let your Twitter account, and all the benefits it can bring to your business, sputter out and die from lack of upkeep.
Nothing looks worse than a year old account with only 5 or 6 tweets. It just screams out “I don’t care! I’m a loser who starts things but doesn’t stick with them”. Unless of course you lost your password and can’t remember the email address you used to sign up, so you have had to abandon that account and start a new one. This has happened to me – twice. So I guess that would scream out “I’m a disorganized loser who would lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on”. But I digress…
Seriously, if you come across an account with 5 tweets, and the last one was 6 months ago, are you going to follow them? I doubt it. And if you decide to clean your account up a bit, who are you going to unfollow? The people who haven’t tweeted in a great while, that’s who.
So how can you keep your Twitter account updated without spending hours of your precious time? And how can you be sure that your account is updated with tweets that are current and relevant? What you need is something that can truly be put on auto-pilot and will require nothing from you, except the preliminary set up.
Now please understand that this is not a substitute for actually building relationships with your followers, and talking to your potential customers or clients. But it is a great way to fill in the gaps when you are too busy, and to keep your followers up-to-date on the latest news in your industry or hobby. It’s also a great way to keep yourself up-to-date on the latest news in your industry or hobby, by taking a few minutes to read your own auto-tweets.
Set Up Two Accounts
What you are going to do is to set up some keyword feeds using Google Alerts, and then feed them to your Twitter account using Twitterfeeds. So first, you will need to set up those two accounts. One for Google Alerts and one with TwitterFeed.
When you set up your first TwitterFeed, you may also need your Twitter name and password, unless you are already logged in to your Twitter account. And don’t worry, if you have multiple Twitter accounts, TwitterFeed can keep track of all of them. And you can set up different feeds for each one.
Set Up A Google Alert
First, open both Google Alerts and TwitterFeed in two separate browser windows or tabs, so that you can move from one to the other easily. Log in to both accounts. Then, start with setting up a Google Alert.
- Choose your keyword or keyword phrase. Choose something that matches the subject of your website, or your business or hobby. You can use a single word or a phrase. If you use a phrase, be sure to enclose it in quotes, or you will get alerts for any of the words in the phrase. For example, if you want alerts about “internet marketing”, and you don’t use quotes, you will get alerts about any kind of marketing (think MLM and grocery shopping), plus any alerts that contain the word internet – and those could cover a LOT of unrelated ground.
- Once you have your keyword or phrase in place, make the following choices: everything, as-it-happens, up to 20 results, and FEED.
- Now click on Feed, and copy the URL you see in your address bar.
Set Up a Twitter Feed
Now switch over to the tab or window that has TwitterFeed in it. Log in to your TwitterFeed account. Just be sure you don’t use the copy function, since you are still holding the URL of your keyword feed on the clipboard.
- Click on “create a new feed”, in the upper right-hand area.
- Enter a name for your feed. I use the keywords I chose for the Google Alert. You don’t need any quotes here.
- Now paste in the URL feed address that you copied from your alert.
- Press the “test the feed” button, just to make sure you got the entire URL copied correctly.
- Continue to Step 2
- Click on the link that says Twitter
- Now click on the Authenticate Twitter Using OAUTH button
You can go into the advanced settings if you like, but it isn’t really necessary. Unless you are feeding several keyword feeds into one Twitter account. If so, you may want to change the default time settings, so that they will be staggered, rather than all publishing at once. The default is to publish a tweet every hour, if there is something to tweet. With multiple keywords, you may want to set that to every 2 hours or even less often.
One of two things will happen. If you are signed on to your Twitter account, the app will ask for your permission to access the account. Just say yes. If you are not signed on, or the app can’t find your account, you will need to enter your username and password, and then say yes to allow the app in.
Once that is finished, click on the “create service” button, and you are finished! It will take an hour or so before you will start getting tweets fed to your Twitter account, but once they do, even you will be quite interested in your own tweets!
