By the title, if you’re in the know you know that the inspiration for this post comes courtesy of our friend Adrienne Smith, who wrote a post that I commented on last week titled My Secret Twitter Strategy. I’m not going to reveal her specific strategy, since she took the time to create this neat little video about it, but I will say that there’s a bit of automation, if you will, taking place that helps her out.

In my case, I can’t quite say I have a lot of automation, but I have a brief bit. I do use technology, but it’s certainly not automated. Also, it takes a lot more time for what are results less than what she gets, but I think the important thing is having a strategy to begin with.

My first strategy is that every single blog post I write or have, if you will, goes to Twitter automatically. I thought about the question of whether to create separate accounts for each blog and decided my mind just can’t handle being 5 or 6 different people so it all goes out under the one name. In a way that matters because everything gets mixed together and my audience might get confused. In another way that’s what this particular blog is all about anyway, so having a lot more original content going through one name works for me right now.

The next thing I do is go through the list of local people that I’ve created using an older and better version of TweetDeck to see what’s specifically going on with them. I feel it’s important enough for me to make sure I take care of my local networking to keep my presence known by them. It’s a small group of around 45 people that I stick to because they’ll talk back to me. Others who never responded to anything I had to say I removed, figuring they could care less so why waste my time on them.

The final thing I do takes some time, and I’m not sure everyone could do it or want to do it but it’s my strategy, and it works because I have a smartphone. By using the application on my phone called TweetCaster, I can literally go through hundreds, possibly thousands, of tweets if I need to. Whereas on TweetDeck I tell it to only keep the last 250 messages, I don’t tell the phone to do any such thing.

It’s a good thing I speed read, that’s for sure. If I don’t stay on top of it I can find myself two days behind the curve on checking on tweets. The program will break it into time chunks so that you don’t have to look at everything unless you want to, but that still leaves a heck of a lot of messages.

What do I do? I do through the link of everyone that I’m following, which is just under 900 people, looking at topics that I think interest me, check the links out quickly, then retweet them. Sometimes I retweet with a comment, showing that I looked at the link, while other times I’ll save the link via Evernote so I can go back and leave a comment on it later when I’m back on the big machine and still retweet it.

This strategy does two things for me. One, people love seeing their items retweeted, and they’ll often thank me for it and might pop over to this blog, or any other blog if they notice a link to a blog post I’ve recently written. Two, by going back to their blogs later on and leaving a comment, it helps introduce me to them, or remind them that I’m around, and they’ll potentially pop over to one of my blogs to say something. Either way, it helps drive traffic to my sites.

How well does it work? Well, compared to Adriene, the direct traffic I get from Twitter is around 4% referral traffic for this blog, but it’s a whopping 20% of referral traffic for my business blog. I’m thinking that’s pretty neat. Twitter seems to be her top referrer doing it her way.

Anyway, that’s my strategy; what’s yours?
 

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