Jenise Fryatt Bio

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who was amazed at how I seem to be on Twitter all the time. "Don't you sleep?" she asked. During the same conversation she questioned the wisdom of Twitter users who post 10 or 20 tweets back to back. It made me think that now might be a good time to share a few tools and strategies that I use in managing my social media presence.

No, I'm not on Twitter all the time. I admit to checking it several times a day, but that usually only takes 30 seconds to 3 minutes at a time. I do spend at least one 10 -20 minute block of time scheduling my tweets.  I try to tweet 8 to 10 times on most days. And the tool I use for scheduling is Hootsuite.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a free tool that allows you to manage your activity on several social media sites at one time. With Hootsuite I can follow several streams from lists I've created or hashtags I follow or just search terms. I can also schedule tweets or posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, though I usually only use it for Twitter.

I only schedule tweets that are informative or retweets of someone else's tweets. I wouldn't schedule conversational tweets because I might not be there when they get posted and so wouldn't be able to respond in a conversation. My informative tweets are usually links that I have gathered from reliable news sources and blogs that I follow. 

As I said, I usually post 8 to 10 tweets per day as a rule to maintain an active presence on Twitter. I try never to post tweets back to back. Back to back tweets from one person are annoying to many people and can get you unfollowed. Also Twitter analysts have said that the optimum frequency of tweets, if you want to be retweeted (and who doesn't?) is one per hour, so that's how I schedule mine.

Gathering useful links to post does take a little more time. I can spend anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours per day doing this. But the more time I spend gathering, the more links I usually have to tweet. And with a tool like Hootsuite, I can schedule most of my tweets for the next few days all at one sitting.

Hootsuite is by no means the only option for scheduling your social media activity. Another popular choice is TweetDeck. Or you might try an application such as Buffer which has it's own advantages. 


Tweepi/Refollow

With Twitter it's important to keep an eye on your ratio of followers to people you are following. 

If you are following many more people than are following you, it may cause some to think you are not providing good content. So it's a good idea to sporadically uncover which people you are following who aren't following back and then UNFOLLOW them. A couple of very useful and free tools to help you do this are Tweepi and Refollow.

Beware, however, when unfollowing many people at once. Twitter has an issue with this and discourages too much automation. Make sure not to unfollow too many people at one time and you will be fine. I personally don't usually unfollow more than 50 people at one time. 

One thing to keep in mind is that if you are unfollowing people who aren't following you back, others will do the same thing to you. So if you want to keep those followers, be sure to follow them back!

There are many, many more tools that will help you manage your social media activity. Whenever you can, you may want to take some time to explore what's out there. The ability to manage the information we receive as well as disperse is quickly becoming what separates the social media dabblers from the virtuosos.