How to Manage Twitter in 15 Minutes a Day

Woah, woah, woah, slow down there.

I know, it’s hard to slow down in this fast-paced world we live in. As a marketing professional, you’re always on the go; whether you’re in meetings, neck deep in content creation or compiling data with aligning reports. So how are you supposed to effectively manage your company’s social media channels?

Managing your company’s social media presence can be overwhelming, time-consuming and elaborate. It’s not an easy job, in other words. But it can be - if you have the right tools and strategies.

In this post, we’ll focus on how to manage your Twitter account in less than 15 minutes per day. With 9,100 tweets scrolling by each second, Twitter is the fastest-paced social media platform out there, but it’s also one of the largest.  It’s important that you know how to make your presence known (in as little time as possible), particularly if your ideal customers are tweeting.

Pre-Daily Routine

Before you begin implementing a daily routine for managing your Twitter account, there are a couple preliminary steps to take that will make your routine more efficient and effective.

1) Create lists/streams

On Twitter, you have the capability of creating lists. Lists allow you to segment who you follow into different categories based on common interests, occupations, content and more. These lists can be made public or private, whichever you prefer and feel is appropriate.

New Breed List Examples:

• New Breeders (employees)
• Sales Success (influencers within the sales industry)
• C-Suite (C-level executives)
• Competitors (private list)
• Social Media Samurais (individuals that kill social media and speak to the topic)
• HubSpot Affiliates (HubSpot partners who aren’t direct competition)
• NBM Client Handles (private list of clients)

Insider Tip: If you’re a HubSpot user, you also have the ability to upload these lists in HubSpot to create custom streams. Within HubSpot’s Social Inbox, there is a tool that allows you to create categories to monitor particular keywords, hashtags, trends and even particular contact lists in your database (all while excluding those you don’t want to see).

2) Determine Content Curation

Before you jump into managing your Twitter account, you have to determine where and how you’re going to curate content to share. Twitter isn’t a platform to solely talk about yourself, it’s a place for conversation and to do so you need to be sharing other industry news, trends and information.

At New Breed, I like to use a service called Feedly, which is basically a news aggregator application that compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources.I use it not only for New Breed, but also many of our customers as well. Another great reader service to check out would be Digg.

With both services, you have to create and compile lists of blogs and other news sources you want to read on a daily basis. For New Breed, I’ve compiled new sources that range from Forbes to Social Media Today to The Verge. It’s super easy and significantly decreases time and energy spent on finding great content to share.

Daily Routine

Are you ready? Do you have time right now? Let’s do this!

7 Minutes in the Morning

When you first wake up, have breakfast or get to the office, here’s what you should be doing first:

• 1 Minute: Respond to tweets, direct messages and new followers (I always thank new followers - personal preference)
• 1 Minute: Scan through your home feed to see what your network is chatting about - in that time retweet at least one tweet
• 1 Minute: Scan through a couple of your lists/streams based on the topics you’d like to focus on that morning/day
• 1 Minute: Take a look at your own content; schedule out a tweet for your most recent blog post, or an interesting content offer that you have - make sure you’re promoting yourself along with others
• 3 Minutes: Hop onto your Feedly or Digg and scan through articles and curate at least 2 - 3 articles based on the latest and greatest industry trends, and that also align with your buyer personas. Schedule them out using your favorite scheduling tool (of course, we like Social Inbox)

Insider Tip: If you’re a HubSpot user, then you have the capability of downloading the HubSpot browser plugin which allows you to share content directly from the web page/source you find it on rather than copy-and-pasting the link and navigating back to your social media posting tool. Efficiency people, that’s what it’s all about!

3 Minutes in the Afternoon

• 1 Minute: Respond to tweets and direct messages
• 1 Minute: Scan home feed again - Be sure to interact and engage: retweet, favorite, reply
• 1 Minute: Find some new people to follow - anyone from influencers/individuals of interest, individuals/companies who have engaged with your brand, prospects, customers, etc.

5 Minutes in the Evening

• 1 Minute: Respond to tweets and direct messages
• 1 Minute: Scan home feed and engage with any worthy opportunities
• 3 Minutes: Schedule a few tweets to go out while you’re sleeping or first thing the next morning - here is an opportunity for you to dig into your own content and find blog posts or content offers to share 

Reminder: Throughout the day you should be tweeting regularly. Most of us don’t have time to tweet as we go, so using a scheduling tool will help save you a ton of time in the long run. Use HubSpot to schedule your tweets out for at least a day ahead of time.

Have a few extra minutes to devote to your social strategy? Add an extra 15 minutes to your morning routine and schedule more blog posts, ask questions, articles, premium content offers and more that you’d like to share with your audience.

And there you have it, folks! You can now quickly and effectively manage your Twitter account without crying or screaming or wanting to rip your hair out. We promise, it’s really not that hard. We want you to enjoy your time on social media - and most importantly have fun while doing it!

Happy Tweeting!