Twitter is something that at first seems pretty simple, easy to use and maybe a little bit silly. It certainly has the potential for vapid stupidity and noise for no reason. However, there is another side to it in the way that individuals and organizations have made it into a very powerful tool. News outlets, rebels, government agencies, terrorists and major corporations have all managed to use Twitter to share information with their very different audiences. There is a huge potential to make dramatic announcements and even bigger errors on twitter.

Last year, twitter users heard the story of the young lady who jokingly made a racially insensitive tweet and then departed on an intercontinental flight, only to find the world awaiting her arrival, and unemployment. Social media is no joke and you can go from zero to a million miles an hour in minutes.

For the well-known celebrity or the established brand with a ready-made following the process of creating an audience on Twitter is straightforward and simple. It may require a budget being spent or some time and energy but the big names can get out there quickly and be heard. What about the rest of us? What is the answer to the question of how can you make the best use of Twitter?

A Little Automation Goes A Long Way

The short answer is that you can do it by putting in consistent rate work over an extended period of time. If you don’t have the pre-made audience, the brand or the funding the simplicity of Twitter means that you can bootstrap your way to success. First you may wish to define exactly what success means to you in social media. There are numerous tools to help you automate your social media output. My personal preference is to use Feedly to monitor and collect information, and HootSuite to distribute the information around various social media accounts. It enables the user to mix different social media streams and monitor the response that you get from your posts.

The First – Programmed Tweets

Social media and Twitter in particular are great avenues to for the dissemination of information. That information can be classified by immediacy as well as source. The first classification to examine is the lowest frequency, the least personal, which is scheduled or programmed tweets. These are great for the sort of information that can be read off of a calendar.

This is the scheduled part of your Twitter Strategy. Here is where you make announcements and fixed statements that you want to put out there to remind your audience about what you do and where you are. Scheduling tweets allows you to produce information at a constant rate. You look like you are a real person who actually has something interesting to say, as long as you attempt to say reasonably interesting things.  If you keep the output of scheduled information tweets at a slow and steady pace it will get your information out without annoying anyone too much.

The Second – Curated Tweets

There’s a lot of stuff out there on the Inter-webs that will catch the interest of your followers. It helps to humanize you that you repeat and retweet the things that are going on a daily basis. I use Feedly to get RSS feeds of the things that fit my interests and set aside a part of the day to go through the list and find things that are relevant or just amusing in ways appropriate to a particular Twitter stream.

The Third – The Humanizing Factor of Direct Tweets

If you don’t have this third part of your Twitter strategy then you risk looking like a non-human. You need to show some actual reactions to the events around you and the messages and connection that others make with you. Again, it doesn’t have to be often but it should be fairly regular throughout the week.

The Lurking Fourth Horseman

What goes on behind the scene is as important as everything that you post. Knowing what’s going on comes down to monitoring your feeds with something like TweetDeck, which will give you the basics of what’s going on, who’s following and joining in on the conversation. For more detailed and broader controls HootSuite gives you everything that TweetDeck has and more. It integrates Twitter with other social networks and helps you post to multiple networks. You can schedule posts in bulk by uploading CSV files. You also get additional information about your own accounts and your followers’ with Klout Scores.