Comments on: How I Automated Tweets for a Year: My Experience & Guide To Scheduling Quality Tweets

By: Brett Snyder

Brett Snyder — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 20:52:29 +0000

I’ve always encouraged adding in the Twitter handles of the author as an essential element for engagement and this is awesome to see some validation of that approach using this case study.
One follow-up question: One of the biggest fears behind automating anything is that you’ll publish something at the “wrong time” (unexpected disaster, for example). It seems like your article selection helps mitigate the risk of this at all but did you have any instances where the automated posts fired at an inappropriate time? What did you do/would you do to address this if so?

By: Larry Ludwig

Larry Ludwig — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 20:13:30 +0000

In reply to Brett Snyder.

Thanks Brett!
So far I haven’t had any tweets go at the wrong time (that I’ve noticed). And I’d say that goes back to having the right list, and sharing pieces that I really have actually read. My source (newsletter plus a few bookmarks from my Pinboard account) had some pieces that weren’t timely, but were easy to curate before I uploaded the list.
I have had a couple instances of mentioning the wrong person. In both cases, the person let me know and it was easy enough to apologize and delete the tweet. I think I’d do the same with an un-timely tweet.
But just to reiterate, this system isn’t meant to “do automatically Twitter for you/your business” but just to give a foundation of direct sharing so that you can spend time and thought manually tweeting out the timely items and engaging with people. Having that list of “evergreen” industry resources or bookmarks is key – I wouldn’t recommend grabbing a random list of the top stories of 2014 and scheduling them out.

By: Larry Ludwig

Larry Ludwig — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 23:15:21 +0000

In reply to Siva.

Hi Siva! Thank you for the kind words – and glad you found the post useful. Here’s answers in order –
1. Yes, my tweets are scheduled out for the next year and I’ve highlighted the results 6 months in. I’ll update this post as I get more insights.
2. So Twitter will automatically shorten the URLs to 22 characters. You can certainly use bit.ly, goo.gl or even Buffer’s built-in link shortener if you want to further cut down on length and/or get an extra layer of click-through analytics. My focus is on person to person engagement rather than traffic, so I just kept it simple with Twitter’s default link shortening service. Great point though!
3. I use Twitter’s own analytics service at analytics.twitter.com to measure clicks, engagement and other useful data that Twitter provides.
All great questions! Let me know if you have others!

By: Siva

Siva — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 13:03:22 +0000

Hi Larry,
Thanks for showing your case study, and it is really impressive. Your subject mentioned that you’ve automated the tweets for a year, but here you have shown the results for 6 months ? , Great to notified the characters length of Twitter ( 140 ) , but instead you can use some tool or Google shorten URL to solve the URL length ? that helps in adding some more characters in your tweet. May I know that Analytic s tool that you’re using for your Twitter Account ?
Please let me know. Sorry I wouldn’t wish to ask you to many questions, but just thought of it 🙂 . You’ve given right post, my eyes like to see the greater results set on Twitter, your’s off course caught it.

By: Larry Ludwig

Larry Ludwig — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 12:56:54 +0000

In reply to Aurelie Chazal.

Thanks for the comment Aurelie! I didn’t schedule any hashtags in that batch, but it would be simple to integrate. My previous pre-automation experience with hashtags was that they generate more spam than true engagement.
But I agree that it’s worth a test 🙂

By: Aurelie Chazal

Aurelie Chazal — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 08:18:35 +0000

I was a bit skeptical when I started reading the article as a big part of Twitter is focused on trends and new articles.
After reading, I have to say that’s really interesting. I love how automating the tweeting process allowed you to focus more on engagement in the end. Great food for thoughts :).
I was just wondering, I see you didn’t use hashtags in the tweets we can see on the screenshots, did you schedule any tweets with industry # just to test if it improve engagement and visibility? Would be interesting to study 🙂

By: Larry Ludwig

Larry Ludwig — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 10:28:56 +0000

In reply to Christine Funke.

Thank you for the kind words Christine! Glad you found it useful 🙂

By: Christine Funke

Christine Funke — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 08:34:28 +0000

Larry, great article! I appreciated the walk-through with the spreadsheet formulas, Screaming Frog and Bulk Buffer (new to me) and liked your conclusion that although it didn’t help you get more leads or click throughs, it helped you connect with people.
I think Twitter has a very specific purpose and scheduling Tweets is undeniably part of it, so seeing your combined approach explained here is a breath of fresh air. I will definitely be bookmarking this article and of course scheduling it in Buffer with your Twitter handle. 😉

By: Larry Ludwig

Larry Ludwig — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 21:36:02 +0000

In reply to Luke L.

Luke, thank you for the comment – but even more so, thank you for the tool! It’s really amazing both in functionality & UX.

By: Luke L

Luke L — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 21:31:52 +0000

As the creator of Bulk Buffer, I just wanted to say it’s great to see so many people find it so useful as a part of their toolset. Thank you for the kind words.