7 Steps To a 30 Minutes Daily Routine in Twitter

Last post I talked about the main reasons people use Twitter.  And as it turns out only 16% use it for marketing purpose.  It’s very likely that this percentage keeps growing by the minute, but let’s assume that it keeps been under 20%.

And I said previously it’s also very likely that of that 16-20%, only 2-3% have a well-established marketing plan.

So, if you’re among those who  use Twitter for marketing purposes, it’s mandatory that you establish a DMO (daily method of operation), a plan that you’ve designed, you feel confortable with and more importantly has the main goals you want to accomplish.

I’ve been in Twitter for about 4 months and I used to be one of thoses 2-3% without a plan, because I mainly use it for marketing purposes.  But in the last couple of months I’ve put into action a daily routine and my results have trippled.

Before I get into the 7 steps, it’s important to point out that you need to have a marketing plan for Twitter that includes your main objective for using Twitter, the number of ads you will send, the number of followers you want to reach by week and the number of tweets you will send per week.  Hence make sure you have a week plan.

So here it goes: A daily Twitter routine in 7 simple steps and 30 minutes.

1. Take care of Followers. Click on followers and follow everyone who you’re not following yet. Block people without pictures and that you’re not interested in following. (Time: 2 minutes)
2. Get rid of your Unfollowers. Click on following and unfollow whoever has not followed you back in the last 24 hours.  If they didn’t follow you during this time, they most likely will never do. (Time: 2 minutes)
3. Respond to your Direct Messages. This step is done better in Twitterdeck, so install it on your desktop from here.  Within Twitterdeck check first all the direct messages you’ve received and respond where needed or beneficial.  Then check to see if anybody has mentioned you or retweeted your tweets and thank them and return the honor! Lastly, clear all the direct messages, can be done easily from Twitterdeck as well so that you don’t accumulate unread or read messages and have a cleaner view of who is messaging you. Note: if for some reason you didn’t have tha habit of deleting direct messages and now you have a thousands and thousands just sitting there, I recomend you to use the service from link, they charge you $5 for deleting everything at once, and once clean you can start with the daily routine of deleting yourself. (Time: 6 minutes)
4. Increase your Followers. Add new people to keep growing your followers. Select people you identify with or that are similar to you and follow their followers.  Go to your followers, pick one person you like, click on their followers and start following the followers of at least 5 of their pages.  You will find that you’re already following some of those people, simply ignore them and keep adding whoever you’re not following yet.  Repeat this step 3 times each day.  This means that you will pick 3 of your best followers and follow 5 pages of their followers per day.  Another way to get great people to follow is going to Twellow.com and search for people using tags or keywords related to your niche.  Also you can search for people clicking on the Find People link within Twitter, and writing the names of people you know or writing the tag or keyword as well. (Time: 16 minutes)
5. Tweet. Make sure you tweet interesting information 3-4 times per day. These tweets are about something you read, some retweet of your friends, quotes and quips, jokes, a blog from your post. You don’t need to login to Twitter to do these tweets, you can use Tweetdeck, something like TwitSnip, Socialooomph.com, to name a few.  Also, make sure you communicate with the people you’ve established some kind of relationships.  Try to be present, make positive comments on your friend’s tweets and get involved. (Time: 4 minutes, 1 minute per tweet throughout the day)
6. Add Marketing Tweets. (Maybe the main reason you’re reading this post!) You need to find the right dosis here, don’t want to overdo it or do too little.  So I define the number of marketing tweets from the numbers of followers I have, most followers more tweets I send.  Now, the real logic has more to do with the numbers of followings your followers have, because the less friends they have, the more likely they get to see everyone’s tweets and get more annoyed if you market too much.  So I just assume most of my followers have lots of followings and this criteria has worked fine for me. Less than 3K followers =1, 3K-10K = 2, 10K-20K = 4, 20K-30K = 5 ads per day.    Remember marketing tweets are your ADS, so make sure you have them ready, write them in advance, test them and repeat the same ads for a whole week.  Read this great post  by Guy Kawasaki on how to drive traffic with repeat tweets. If you prepare your ads once a week, you can schedule your marketing tweets easily in Twitterlater.com. Be creative and rewrite your adds every week (Time: 30 minutes per week)
7. Test, analyse, improve and repeat. If you prepare your ads in advance you can even track them to see which adds are getting the clicks and sells.  I like using bit.ly for shortening my links because they provide me with info on the clicks I receive. Also I add a number to each of my ads and I add tracking to the links, so each of my ads has a different bit.ly link. But I do this while preparing the ads in step 6, and because I only use 2-3 ads a day per week, it really doesn’t take any time to organize my ads this way. As with any other marketing strategy, testing and tracking is essential. (Time: 10 minutes)

So there they are the 7 simple steps, the first 5 should be done everyday, preferably at the same time and for a total of 30 minutes.  The last 2 should be done once a week.

Here is a list of some of the sites I recomend to short cut your time with Twitter:

Twitterdeck
Twellow.com
Twollo.com to automatically follow people within your niche and same interest
TwitSnip to tweet from the web interesting stuff outside Twitter
Socialooomph.com previous Twitterlater
Quotes

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