Managing my Twitter Community

Lots of bloggers have their favorite ways of managing their Twitter streams, so my method may not work for everyone. You can spend an ungodly amount of time on Twitter if you’re not careful. Even I got sucked into the black hole of Twitter and had to re-prioritize to make myself a more purposeful blogger. I have tried different ways of coordinating my Twitter time into manageable pockets of my schedule and so far, this is what works for me. However, I try to stay as flexible as possible to adjust as needed. If  you’re not flexible then you might find yourself giving up, because the Internet continually grows and changes.

When I’m in Twitter I put people into lists. This is one of the best ways for me to manage my time in the twitterverse. I have various different ways in which I list people and some of them get listed in more than one list.

Once I have them in lists, I log into Hootsuite. In Hootsuite, I can view more lists all at once instead of one list at a time. I can also have several tabs too, but in the image below I omitted the names of the tabs for privacy’s sake. All that tabs can be moved into your preferred order. View this video to find out how to import your Twitter lists into Hootsuite.

You can see in the image below, that I can observe a vast grouping of people at a glance.

Creating Twitter Lists:

• I create different lists, but might list one person more than once. For ex; if they are a blogger, homeschooler, and photographer; they would get on three lists.
• Some lists I LOCK to keep private. Only I can see them.
• I can follow lists made by other people. Go to their profile and look for their lists. In there, you can ‘follow list’.

Options:

When I hover my cursor over a tweet, a window opens to show me my options. I can..

• reply
• retweet
• direct message (DM)
• reply all
• email the tweet to myself
• or reply all (if there are more people in the conversation)

Schedule ReTweets:

A little pet peeve I have is when my stream looks like I was on for one pocket of time during the day. So if I am retweeting something, I like to schedule it to publish later. I don’t want all my retweets to appear at once, it makes it look like I’m attacking my followers with a machine gun.

Schedule Tweets:

I also like to schedule my tweets at  intervals throughout the day. I do this because people are not always sitting on Twitter at the same time every day. So I like to have my posts go out at different times. A few tips for that are:

• Re-word the text when sending out the same link.
• Use the link shortener (Add a link window) to give you more character space in your tweet.
• Don’t hesitate sending out popular posts from your archives
• Use the scheduler to send out links to conversations from your Facebook pages.

In addition to these simple steps, I use the Twitter app on my phone to reply to those who have replied, retweeted, or send me direct messages (without having to be at my desk).

Use Hashtags:

• Using hashtags is how you can get your tweet to appear in streams that people follow.
• Be sure the hashtag is appropriate for that audience (ex; don’t use a #photo hashtag if you’re not using your own photos)

Homeschool Community Hashtags:

• #hsbloggers
• #homeschool
• #EdChat
• #eLearning
• #MathChat
• #Science
• #Grammar
• #preschool

List of 70 Super Useful Homeschool hashtags

Christian Hashtags:

• #Christian
• #faith
• #grace
• #church
• #Jesus
• #worship

Photography Hashtags:

• #photos
• #photography
• #photogs
• #photochat

You can add hashtags to the tweets you want to retweet. If you find a tweet useful for a hashtag group you collaborate with, add their hashtag. For ex; sometimes I find interesting things on National Geo’s stream that #HSbloggers might be interested in for #Science class. When I retweet, I add the coordinating hashtag.

The reason why I do all of this is because I want people in the twitterverse to find value in my tweets. The more value they place on my tweets, the more they are allowing me to influence them. I want to be an influencer because I find value in what I have to say and I aim to produce tweets that have value. I believe in lifting people up. The more people who follow my stream, the better chance I have at getting on their lists.

Does all this really work? Is it even necessary?

I believe so! When I am faithful at using the scheduler on Hootsuite, the more traffic that comes to my blog. But to spend all this time driving traffic to my blog would be pointless if I don’t have good content. Since I don’t have a lot of time to write every day on my blog (and I honestly don’t want to because there is a life out there to live), then I make sure to put my ALL into the few articles I do post each week.

Keep in mind though, I’m driving traffic to my blog so I can connect with PEOPLE, not with advertisers or for a cash flow. So that’s my Twitter time in a nutshell. I hope you’ll follow me on Twitter and add me to one (or more) of your lists.

How do you manage your Twitter time?

Got any tips to share?

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