Some of my loyal readers are going to see the mention of Twitter and be immediately disappointed. That group feels every single post should be about CorelDRAW and only CorelDRAW. The harsh reality is that posts about CorelDRAW are the least read posts I write. Yet no matter the topic of a post, the writing is only the first step. Once written, I have to promote a post so that it is read by as many people as possible.

I know that having more readers will also lead to more people investing in my products and services. Some of you receive the posts via e-mail and choose to read the ones that sounds most interesting to you. Others will get the weekly newsletter and click on the posts that grab your attention. There is also a big readership from links to each post on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. Today, I’m going to focus on how each post is shared on Twitter. While you may not have a goal of getting people to read something you’ve written, you undoubtedly have something you’d like to promote. Therefore it is up to you to learn from the strategy I’m going to share and adjust it to best meet your goals.

Twitter provides one of the best platforms for sharing content of value. Yet your message can also be easily overlooked. When you look at your Facebook News Feed, you only see a small portion of the posts made by your “friends” and the pages you like. Facebook tries to determine the posts that would interest you most and culls the list considerably. Twitter is like a firehose where everything posted by those you follow will be in your feed. Therefore it is likely only a small percentage of your followers will see a particular tweet because of the vast number of posts in their feed.

Some users tweet the same thing over and over and over to make sure their post is seen. If all you post is that one thing, it is quite possible you’ll lose followers who tire of seeing that same tweet. Yet if you don’t tweet something again, many followers won’t see it. You need to find a balance where you post interesting content again without overdoing it.

You’re probably thinking that taking the time to sit at your computer or mobile device to tweet all day would be very unproductive. One of my favorite services is Social Oomph. It allows you to develop a library of tweets (they call them queue reservoirs) that will be posted on the schedule you select. Sure, it would allow you to spam out the same tweets over and over. Do you think that will help you gain followers and/or customers? Instead you want to have a large enough list of tweets containing content that followers will want to read. And it needs to be sent out on a schedule that won’t overwhelm people.

The posts can be text only. They can include a link, which I shorten in advance using Bitly. Even better, the posts can include photos or graphics. Of course it can be important to add hashtags if the tweet is about a specific topic. Ideally it can be a mix of all of the above.

I’ve been using Social Oomph for around a year and my reservoirs now contain more than 500 unique tweets. Even if I set up a schedule where ten of them are sent each day, it would take around a month and a half for every tweet to be posted even a single time. Yes, the tweets are set to be put back in the queue and sent again in the future. I regularly add new content to the list and remove old content that isn’t as relevant going forward.

By building these lists, I am able to tweet quality content each day automatically. This does not mean that I don’t post content manually. Nor does it mean I shouldn’t interact with others on Twitter. Both of those are a very important part of Twitter strategy. Using automation for tweets gives me more time for that interaction! It is those scheduled tweets that can often start a conversation as followers respond to what I’ve posted. You’ve even seen some of those tweeted responses show up in a future blog where I can give a more detailed answer than what will fit in 140 characters.

I opened my Twitter account almost exactly five years ago. I didn’t do much of anything with it for the first three years as I just didn’t get it. Now that I better understand it, I make better use of Twitter. My strategy isn’t perfect and I will continue to improve it going forward. But adding Social Oomph as a tool to help promote my content has made a big difference that is well worth the cost of the service.