Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Tweet Scheduling with iMacro using HootSuite

Once again, I have come up with a not-so-unique however semi-automated tweeting solution, which is going to save you a lots of months’ efforts and of course staff’s salary. Likewise my previous posts, this is another iMacro based tutorial & scrip, which will help you in scheduling your tweets.

A friend of mine actually hired three staff for social media and two of them were doing tweets & scheduling them manually for weeks – unfortunately, all of their effort went useless as tiny amount of traffic arrived from those activities which took months. This doesn’t happen with everyone however as majority of twitter users complain this kind of behavior & eventually some of them actually stop working aggressively at twitter. I don’t blame them for stopping activities however there is always some kind of strategic fault which ruin everything.

Here is what I suggested to my friend & how it helped him getting heavy relevant traffic from Twitter.

Twitter as I posted in my early posts that, is one of the misunderstood forms of social media marketing, for majority, its’ just a tweet which you post however for rest with strategies, it’s one of the fine mediums of driving relevant traffic; personally, I get around 500+ daily traffic just from twitter – amazing however it took lots of time and efforts initially and by passage of time, I’ve included tens of twitter account for this purpose but on initial level, you can get around constant 50+ daily quick visitors within initial two weeks. Before going for the solution, I would like you to follow guidelines thoroughly as each point is important & can help in increasing general traffic towards your website/blog:
  1. Maintain account properly; make sure to have valid website links, pictures, name & background image with your website URL
  2. For bulk activity, your account should be at least one week old, older accounts are perfect for bulk activities so make as many as possible accounts today so that you can use them later
  3. Do some regular activities and add few followers using like4like or twiends.com in first week
Ok here is the deal, above were just check points of a good looking twitter account; once you are done with above, focus on structure of actual tweets. Following are the main points which I personally follow & you will probably hear from others as well:
  1. Its’ good to have lots of followers in your twitter account however it’s useless in most cases. Until and unless are you are celebrity, people won’t follow you, even if you make them follow you, they won’t read your tweets – wastage of time, so don’t go with the strategy to increase followers, you can add thousands of followers in few days just by using websites like like4like.com, twiends.com & tons of other underground websites (Google them yourself). The main point here is to add IDs of real people and make them feel that they are important; these people are aren’t just real, they are taken from twitter IDs of brands, your competitors & other places which you consider contains genuine followers. Like in my friend’s case, he has a local classified website for Dubai market; I had to find his competitors’ twitter IDs, local trading organizations’ IDs & so forth. Once main sources were identified, I acquire all of their followers using iMacro scripts & arrange them in series of two IDs like ‘@jbgrab @alicewilsons’. Consider if you get an email from twitter saying that someone has MENTIONED you in his tweets! Wouldn’t that be a surprise for you and wouldn’t you once read or click the tweet once? This is the main point over here; to contact highly relevant people by their names so that traffic could be generated – got it.
  2. Ok so first point was to acquire relevant IDs and to use their IDs in your tweets – it will for sure generate result however as each tweet contains two IDs which make only two people to visit your page, what about the general public and the followers? Well, story doesn’t end here; second most import part of making a tweet is to add a HASH TAG. What is hash tag? Except the fancy name, these are just ‘Search terms or keywords’ which you include in your tweets and once they are indexed by twitter, you will be listed every time when someone searches those terms. Where from they come? Well, if you are selling something then these will come from product name like #mobile #jobs (try to search more hash tags from main twitter searching tab). This will allow general public, your followers & of course recipients (who’s IDs are included) to see your tweets easily.
  3. Above points were about hash tags & IDs; this points is all about adding website links & tracking your efforts. Since above points take lots of initial efforts there need to some kind of KPI to measure your efforts – isn’t it. Most of the website owners and webmasters use Google tools for tracking daily traffic and Google Analytics (my favorite tool) comes at the top; it offers highly detailed traffic monitoring tools with features to add filters, perform auto-analysis, track campaigns & lots of other cool stuff. So how do twitter activity is tracked with Google Analytics? Google allows different mediums for tracking traffic directly however it includes adding filters and other tracking stuff that most of us don’t know; for keeping it simple; I use ‘Google link builder’ for decoding my links into Google tracking structure & them convert them using TinyURL.com just to make those links smaller (Google ‘Google link builder’ for additional info about it). With Google link builder, you give some precise tracking terms that Google itself use in Google Analytics; in my case, I tell Google that source of the visit is Twitter, medium was Tweet, term was Mobile & it was a text message – rich amount of information is delivered with each link which you can access under ‘Traffic Sources > Source > Campaigns’ from analytic tool. It helps you in making future strategies by providing precise results of individual campaigns.
  4. This is the final point of the series, where I’ll brief you about ‘Structure of Tweet’. Structure of tweet matters a lot, for suppose if you tweet like this ‘@jbgrab get discounted watches at tinyurl.com/xx_some_link #watch’ – will you click the link, well probability is high. This is just one sample/template; you can make customized templates as per product categories – just make sure that all above points are part of your tweet.
So finally you get to know how strategy works! Well, this is the complete strategy that I made myself and been using it from some time and luckily its working great for me and my friends. The only problem with this strategy is that it used a lot of concentration, efforts, time & resources. Well it was little different from my end as I use iMacro based auto-scripts for performing most of the tasks myself including extracting thousands of twitter IDs & scheduling tweets.

Having strategy at hand is the basic thing for a webmaster however implementing phase is another story; based on different factors including appropriate time, data source (IDs), region, competition & other resources, implementation is performed and for all strategies at twitter, you have to be aggressive & bulky. I mean, you can’t get enough traffic even if you are using best available strategy with just a single account; you need to have multiple accounts operating at same time – don’t go like a gold smith, struck harder.

While working with multiple accounts and scheduling, HootSuite.com is my favorite tool of trade. As being free member at Hootsuite.com, it allows adding up-to 10 twitter accounts at same time and unlimited scheduling (I think so, I tried 2k scheduled tweets & it worked). Be careful using scheduling tools as too many tweets in an hour can block your twitter account, twitter allows only 100 hourly API tweets (API means using different websites like other than twitter itself), personally, I set tweet for every ten minutes, three to four tweets an hour for 24 hours (24*3=72 tweets daily). 72 tweets a day, means around 2,160 scheduled tweets a month for a single account – big deal, but how is it possible to set such huge numbers of tweets and what about having 10 accounts in parallel?

Again, iMacro comes handy in conditions like these. Once setting everything in excel sheet (hard part), an iMacro script schedule every tweet for me, usually I set around tweets of 30 days in future in single account, making 10 twitter accounts sending auto-tweets for next 30 days (2,160*10 = 21,600 schedule tweets). Scripts are available individually costing from 30$ to 50$ and if you want me to handle your tweets for a login time, come talk with me – I done this activity for small scale websites to big websites including classifieds and B2B websites like TradeBanq.com.

Your comments, suggestions and inquiries are most welcome here.

3 comments:

  1. Where i can get imacros script for hootsuite?

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  2. @Fedel RM, this is a very old script and doesn't at the moment however it can be re-set to work according to your needs upon special request.

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