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As previously discussed, Twitter is a fantastic way to get some free targeted traffic to your websites, but manually sending tweets on a regular basis is a time consuming and boring task!

All new tweets have an average lifespan of 10 minutes – that means your well thought out tweet will only be visible in other user’s timelines for a very short space of time.

After that, they get lost in the Twhite noise of Twitter!

It is therefore important to tweet regularly.

Also, if you tweet nothing but links to your websites, squeeze pages, products and affiliate campaigns you’re quickly going to get a reputation as a spammer which will result in you losing followers and almost definitely get your account suspended by Twitter.

So is there a way to automate some of your tweets and provide good content to keep your followers interested, all without getting Twitter slapped?!

There certainly is!

I’ve been looking into various ways to automate my Tweets and I think I’ve found a corker!

Now before we start, I would strongly advise that you don’t use this method alone…

Your followers need to know you are a real person and not a robot, so make sure you use Twitter as the social tool it was intended for… in other words, still use it to personally interact with your followers or they’ll soon lose interest in you.

Ok, here we go…

A great way to feed your twitter accounts with a constant stream of valuable, free content, is to use an automation service such as Twitterfeed.

Twitterfeed is a FREE automation tool that allows you to send your favourite RSS feeds directly to your Twitter account so that your tweets are regularly renewed without you having to manually type them out.

You don’t even have to load them into a tweet scheduler like Social Oomph…

Just choose some RSS feeds that you think will interest your followers, set them in Twitterfeed and forget!

Here’s a summary of how I use this method :-

  1. Find an RSS feed for articles relating to my niche. ie Internet Marketing.
  2. Load it into Twitterfeed and add my url shortener details. (bit.ly)
  3. Let it go to work tweeting interesting, article titles with shortended links to the full articles.
  4. Occasionally intersperse my automated tweets with more personal ones, retweets replies etc.

Believe me, this really works and I can see from my bit.ly account that my tweets are getting a lot of clicks.

Some pros and cons…

Pros -

  1. You have a constant stream of tweets which include keywords your potential followers are looking for, so you’ll grow your following organically. (So no need to mass follow hundreds of people in the hope they’ll follow you back.)
  2. You are providing good, niche content to your followers, thereby keeping them interested in your tweets and clicking on your links. (Ready for when you do want to send them to your squeeze page or blog.)
  3. You can spend much less time trawling the net for quotes, news stories and articles to interest your followers. (And spend more time doing the things that actually make you money online.)
  4. If you choose RSS feeds that are relevant to your niche and that benefit your followers in some way, you’ll be loved for it. (They’ll be more likely to trust you, be more willing to do business with you and buy from you in future)

Cons -

  1. Although the content will be interesting to your followers, the links within your tweets are directing your traffic to websites other than yours so your RSS Tweets won’t directly send traffic your way. (However, having tested this method for a few weeks, I find it does keep my followers responsive to clicking on my links)
  2. Some followers may find your Twitterfeed tweets impersonal and some may even consider them spam. (You can’t please everyone on twitter. Everyone has their own opinions on how you should use it and what is considered spam – in my opinion, relevant, free content is NOT spam!)

In summary, I think this is a great method for keeping your followers interested in you and it means you don’t have to spend hours finding useful content.

Most people will understand the reasons behind using automation tools and will accept it, however they still want to know there is a person behind the tweets – talk about what you’re doing and engage discussion with people – Remember… this is Social Media, so be sociable! :)

Give it a try and let me know how you get on by leaving a comment below.

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Filed under: Driving Traffic • Social Media • Twitter

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