If you’re among the Twitter addicts who update multiple times per day this post won’t be of very much use. For those of you who are slowly moving away from Twitter because you don’t have the time for daily interaction, keep reading!
There are three primary reasons why users fail to update their Twitter streams:
- Lack of interest – You used Twitter for a few months but never really connected with other users.
- Professional involvement – You spend so much time tweeting for clients that updating your own page feels like too much work.
- Lack of time – You invested a lot of time on Twitter back in the day but quickly found that you spent too much time on the site for what you got out of the experience.
In light of the near-fact that short-form text communications are here to stay, you should consider giving Twitter another try. Why?
- Twitter.com/yourusernamehere will always rank well on search engines. When future employers/spouses/long lost friends search for you online it’s a good idea to have your primary search results display recent and relevant results.
- As your clients embrace Twitter they’ll start looking you up as a person to follow. Just as it’s difficult to trust a 500lb treadmill salesperson, it may be unsettling for clients to find your personal Twitter stream outdated and uninteresting.
- It only takes 5 minutes a week to maintain a relevant and up-to-date Twitter presence.
That’s right. It only takes five minutes a week. How? Try this:
- Sign up for a 3rd party platform that allows you to schedule tweets ahead of time. I recommend CoTweet because its function is straightforward and the interface is easy to navigate. TwitResponse and Hootsuite also include scheduled tweet functions.
- Give your chosen service access to your Twitter account and familiarize yourself with how to update your page from it. Make sure you’re logged in to Twitter.com to make easy work of granting OAuth access to your tweets. (It’s okay if that doesn’t entirely make sense to you. CoTweet’s step-by-step sign-up process will walk you through.)
- Pick a day for your 5-minute Twitter session. Put it on your schedule as a repeat event and stick with it.
- Write 5 tweets. Choose from a statement, a link to something you enjoy, a link to something one of your followers wrote, a celebration of your followers, an @ reply, something zany you overheard, a question, or an RT of something you find interesting.
- Write your tweets and schedule them for the coming week. You can work in a pattern or mix it up. Either way, you’ll have a Twitter page that is personable, interesting, current, and useful.
And it only takes 5 minutes.
Image: SomefoolMatt
Follow Lifehack.org here for a mix of scheduled and entirely spontaneous tweets!
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