Hack Social Media

If you’ve noticed some Twitter users who seem to tweet incessantly throughout the day, you’re not alone. Chances are, they are not actually tweeting themselves, but rather using some online tool to do the work. Case in point: @GuyKawasaki. The reason why I don’t follow him? Well, for one thing, he tweets about every 10 minutes. All the time. It never stops. Shudder.

Luckily, we can use these same malevolent tools to do some good. Namely, to take some of the load off updating your social media profiles.

TwitterFeed

With TwitterFeed, you can update Twitter with the latest post from your blog. It lets you specify update frequency, how your tweets should be structured, and shorten links using a variety of services including bit.ly and TinyURL. Another cool feature is the ability to filter for specific keywords in post titles. For instance, if you only want to tweet posts which contain the phrase “Top 10″, TwitterFeed will only post items containing that phrase. The same can be done for excluding posts containing a certain keyword/phrase.

It doesn’t stop there of course. I prefer to tweet out my own posts when I publish them so that I can customize the message however I like. Rather than update my Twitter account from my blog’s feed, I update it from another blog, usually a blog that I regularly tweet about their posts.

Feedburner

If you go to the Socialize section under Publicize in your Feedburner settings, you can activate automatic post updating to Twitter. The difference with this in contrast to TwitterFeed is that it shortens links using Goo.gl (Feedburner is owned by Google), and keyword filtering is much more precise. By more precise I mean that the filter can also look at an item’s category and also the entire post itself.

Tweet Old Post(WordPress Plugin)

If your blog or website runs on WordPress, you can use this plugin to automatically retweet old blog posts. It lets you specify specific time intervals and also categories from which to post from. I’ve never used this myself mainly because I have a natural aversion towards installing more plugins.

Selective Tweets

You’ve probably noticed this #fb hashtag appended to some peoples’ tweets:

If you didn’t know, you can connect your Facebook account to Twitter account easily. But, what about the other way around? With the Selective Tweets Facebook app, you can update your Facebook status on Twitter. The app lets you choose which tweets you want to have posted to Facebook by posting only the tweets you send that end with the hashtag, #fb. In addition, this app also works with Facebook pages as well.

Tweet Spinner

Tweet Spinner is truly a productivity tool for Twitter. Among its many notable features is its follower manager which you can utilize for finding targeted followers. For instance, you can follow users who tweets certain keywords and even follow the same people as other users.

Another interesting thing to note is its profile rotator, which lets you schedule a rotation of various profile designs and avatars which produces the greatest engagement from users.

For an in-depth overview of Tweetspinner, check out this review by Tamar Weinberg.

With great automation, comes great…wait a minute

Sure, automation is great for your productivity, but realize that if you are a small business owner or an individual trying to establish a brand or reputation online, you should know that social media is about engaging with others.

Other than that, happy tweeting!

Image Credit: Courtney Bolton

This blog post highlights 5 useful social media tools that can help you reduce some of the work load from updating your social media profiles.