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difficult to trust a 500lb treadmill salesperson, it may be unsettling for clients to find your personal Twitter stream outdated and uninteresting.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!
You can stay relevant with only 5 tweets a week? I guess it depends on what your goals are for using Twitter. If you represent a business, I’d say you need a little more engagement than that. I tweet for my company and try to tweet at least 10 times per day with a lot of focus on connecting with others. The more you can get your name out there, the better. Any other thoughts?
I like the idea, and I think scheduled tweets are good, but I think you should get on Twitter daily and spend a couple minutes replying to some people because it seems to me that replying to someone a week later isn’t very personable.
Hi Seth,
You make a very important comment regarding your ‘web impression’. But is ‘some tweets’ better than ‘no tweets’? I tend to agree with you that if people are looking for you, then it is good to be found – provided you realise you will always be found!
Rich
@Lauren – note that I didn’t mention Tweeting in a business sense except for those who also use Twitter for work. This approach probably won’t work as well for a commercial account.
@Andrew – in this case, it’s a decision between 5mins/week and not at all. Most don’t have the time or interest to check in on something daily that doesn’t entirely capture their interest.
@Rich – yes, you’ll always be found… but you have some control over what people find first!
It may be one option, but it’s the anthesis of social media’s value, which lies in engagement, authenticity, real time exchange… Like so many things in life, you get back what you put in.
thnks for sharing. I am also looking for the same.
I only tweet when I have something to rant about or want to pass on some good info I found!
I really have to get back on track of updating my twitter like I used to. I think my excuse has been that I’ve been busy but this post has really made me think and has encouraged me to get back on track. Thanks for sharing!!
Very good article. Thank you for sharing.. Nice idea.
Thanks for sharing this article. Scheduling tweets is a great way to keep twitter from disrupting your day and will keep you from forgetting to update.
is a good tip
[...] How To Tweet in Just 5 Minutes a Week – Stepcase Lifehack – [...]
This is a great idea and I think can be scaled no matter the level of involvement with twitter, once/week to several times a day. Most importantly, you do what you need and move on. Twitter is valuable, but can be a time killer if not used with caution.
Are you guys talking about the same twitter as the one I use? A message is 140 characters or less – twenty-three words if an average word is five letters long. No-one is too busy for that. There’s time in every-one’s day where you’re not doi
ng something – waiting in a line, standing in a lift, heating your lunch in the microwave. If you feel too busy to use twitter, quit. Deal with whatever it is that’s wrong before you go back to it.
Also, scheduling a reply? In the twitter I use, you can only reply to a person, not a ms that character limit, shortened by the @username to indicate a reply. The reply won’t make sense unless it’s received pretty quickly after the original message was sent.
I think this is a great post to get new Twitterers started or to provide a guideline to those who thinks Twitter takes too much time. I like using the tips on a daily instead of a weekly basis though. With the number of tweets that come in daily it is necessary to have a few relevant tweets on your timeline each day. This method can easily be adapted to a daily routine and you still have roughly a half hour per week that you are spending on your personal online brand
very nice!
Third party software and applications are the way to go to build up followers here. You can also use RSS feeds to create automatic tweets, with good content for your readers
Thanks for sharing very interesting post.
Dont really care for twitter like that. It never caught my attention.