Social Media Without Draining Your Day

How in the world, have I tweeted more than seventeen thousand times? Yes, that is an accurate accounting of my activity on Twitter. 

First, I was an early adapter and have been on twitter for seven or eight years. While there are times when I have not blogged or put out my newsletter or other ways to touch my audience, there are very few days that I haven't sent out consistent information about publishing on twitter. 

The result is that I've built a large following on this platform. Publishers are looking for authors who have a large and on-going social media presence. I've often written about platform-building ideas and even have a free Ebook on this topic (use the link to get it immediately).
 
Social media doesn't have to consume your day and hours of time. It can—but doesn't have to do so. It does not drain my day and I'm active in the social media area. For example, I have over 92,000 twitter followers. I want to give you several tools and insights of what I'm doing to consistently have a growing social media presence yet I do it with focused effort.
I tweet daily. In fact, I tweet several times a day. 

Last year I wrote about how I pass along the various reading that I'm doing in the publishing area. Follow this link to read it. I am always looking for great content to pass to my followers. I am consistent in doing this and it only takes seconds to accomplish.
 
Over the years, I've made a number of online resources and free telseminars. I keep a list of these tweets in a small file. Throughout my day, I will cut and paste these tweets into Hootsuite and they go out to my followers. Because I've compiled these tweets into a file, they are easy and quick to find and do not take long to use. 

In addition, I've told twitter to paste all of my tweets on my Facebook profile. While I do not spend much time on Facebook, people regularly thank me for all of the content that I pass along there. It's because of the settings in my Twitter profile that I set once—-that the tweets show up on Facebook.
 
I use Hootsuite throughout the day to post my tweets. If I go on a trip or I'm away from my computer or at a conference, I set up Hootsuite to continue tweeting throughout my trip. You can plan tweets several hours or several days in advance through this tool and it works like clockwork. Recently Regal Books announced this great free ebook with the details about how to use Hootsuite.
 
Every day I use Refollow. I blogged about this tool several years ago. It is not free but worth $20 a month in my view because it is adding about 100 followers a day to my twitter numbers. Every day I get on Refollow and I follow other people's followers. I select people who have the same target market as I have. The followers are selected by their last tweet and I only follow people who are active on twitter by tweeting in the last 24 hours. A certain percentage of these people I follow will begin to follow me and my number of followers continues to increase.
 
Finally every day I use Manage Flitter (Free). This tool improves the quality of my followers. It allows me to quickly eliminate fake twitter profiles, non-English speaking twitter followers and those without an image in the profile. Finally Manage Flitter gives me the ability to unfollow people who do not follow me back. It is an easy tool to us and something I do daily—and some times twice a day. The time factor to use Manage Flitter is minimal and takes seconds to accomplish a great deal with tremendous value in my view.
 
Hopefully I've made this explanation about my social media straightforward and simple so you see how I accomplish it in a short amount of time yet I take action every day and consistently. It is the consistency that counts and draws people to follow me and my information about publishing on a regular basis. If you don't tweet regularly, then there is no need to read your tweets. Yet use free tools like Hootsuite to make the process relatively quick yet effective.