twitter success at info carnivoreContrary to what is constantly pushed on us there is a way to be successful on twitter without using any automation or paying for any tools. In this article I’m going to share the methods and free tools I use to manage my twitter account. I’ve never paid for any tools that I use with twitter. Now I’m not opposed to automation at all, in fact I do use an acceptable amount of it on my twitter account, but the key to twitter success is all about investing a little extra time and injecting strong personal elements into your account. My secret to twitter success is documented in this article “How to Engage others on twitter“. There are many types of tools that will help you automate your twitter account, however a lot of them are spammy or invasive and do not help you present yourself as a real person that is genuinely interested in those who you follow and who follow you. How one measures success on twitter is probably seen differently by many, the first metric people would gravitate towards is follow count, however I don’t think the number of followers one has reveals anything about true twitter success. Klout is a tool some may have interest in, however it may also go only to stroke ones ego, though it may reveal how well you are utilizing twitter and how far your twitter influence is reaching.

The tools, and methods mentioned below are all ones I personally use and recommend.

First, manage Followers manually Within Twitter

I have always enjoyed using twitter to manually follow people. Though there are plenty of tools out there that will assist with this process, and claim to help you find targeted followers etc. I take a look at my new followers once every few days and follow back those that are at a glance legitimate interests. This means people with no bio, no avatar, or speaking foreign languages are not followed by me. Spam bots are often quite easy to detect especially with their generic ‘hot chick’ avatars.

Unfollow Spammers and Inactive Users

I use a webapp called ManageFlitter to unfollow people who have not engaged with me, are spammers, don’t have an avatar, or are no longer active on twitter. An amazing number of people drop off of twitter every day never to return, these accounts should be unfollowed. In addition some people like to take the approach of unfollowing those who have not followed them back, while I do tend to do this myself it isn’t always a best practice. With large follow counts mistakes are bound to be made, and accidentally unfollowing someone important is something one must be cautious of.

Tweet Your Old Blog Articles Automatically

The wordpress plugin Tweet Old Post byAjay Matharu is an excellent tool that will enable you to retweet articles you’ve written as often as you like. Be careful not to just spam your twitter timeline with the same articles over and over again, but the impressive amount of configuration built into this plugin will allow you to set minimum intervals between tweets, maximum age of articles to tweet etc.

Join a Tribe

The tribe mentality is growing, and there are a number of services that have popped up which enable you to syndicate your content quickly by joining “tribes”. The essence of tribes are a mutual exchange of content sharing, you share their content with your sphere of influence, and they will share yours in their sphere of influence. A lot of the services that have popped up cost money to join, but the one I’m a fan of and a part of is triberr. I wrote a review of triberr that you can read, it also includes instructions for joining which is by invitation only. Triberr has really increased my reach on twitter.

Don’t miss a mention, follow your lists, tweet quickly.

Tweetdeck is my tool of choice when it comes to actually interacting on twitter. I’m not going to say much about tweetdeck since it is an incredibly popular desktop application for managing your twitter streams, lists, mentions etc. There is enough that has been written about tweetdeck on the web. The only thing I need to add is that I use it, and it’s perhaps the most effective tool I have in managing my twitter account.

Share other blog content automatically

I use an awesome tool called dlvr.it to share the content of other bloggers on twitter. There are a number of bloggers who I enjoy reading regularly and whose content I believe to be top notch. After reading their blogs for a lengthy period of time I feel comfortable automatically tweeting out their new blog posts. Dlvr.it enables you to enter RSS feeds and twitter accounts and set them up with various configurations to tweet new entries as they become available.

Be Bold, find and engage with power users

Twitter is an amazing platform in the sense that celebrities, sports heroes and lay people alike come together in the same forum to share information and potentially connect. I am still often amazed at the responses I receive from famous individuals in the world who actually take a moment to reply to a question or comment I may have made. These superstars wouldn’t otherwise give me the time of the day, yet twitter provides a platform where we can connect. Do you have some blog content that you think a power user would find valuable? Why not share it with that person? What have you got to lose? I recently shared an article with a power user on twitter that got retweeted by them and resulted in over 700 visits to that article in a matter of hours.

How do you manage your twitter account? Are you finding twitter success?

These are a few of the key weapons in my twitter arsenal. How are you managing your twitter account? And if you’re not following me on twitter yet, please do so here @danielsnyder1. To your twitter success!