4 Twitter Productivity Tips

Twitter is a great tool to create and nurture relationships, share information and build awareness. With over 150 million active users, it can also quickly become a less than useful echo chamber. Here are five tips to hone your Twitter into a lean, productive experience.

Dumpster day

We’ve talked about Dumpster Day: Make your Law Office a Less Cluttered – And Happier – Place to Work. The same applies to your Twitter account. Different numbers have been bandied about regarding how many people you can follow so that you actually see their tweets — from 200-500. But the more we use Twitter the more our “following” count creeps up. It’s time to weed. Set aside an hour or two every month to go over the folks you’re following. If they’re no longer active, unfollow. Untweeps is a free tool that will help you identify inactive users and bulk-unfollow them. If they’re no longer useful, unfollow. If they tweet at a rate that monopolizes your stream, unfollow. If… you get the idea.

Organize

So now you’ve been on Twitter for years and regardless of how ruthlessly you unfollow, you’re still following over 1,000, 2,000, or more Twitterers. It’s time to organize with the handy Twitter Lists. Create a “technology” or “lawyer” list, or you can go finer, like “cloud computing” and then assign the people that you follow to these lists. The lists can be public or private. So when you have only a few minutes to check in on Twitter, click on one of these lists to view related tweets. For more information on how to set up these lists, check out Twitter’s excellent Lists tutorial. When you do have the time, remember to check out the general Twitter stream for a gem or two that you would otherwise miss.

Search

An often overlooked but very useful tool is Twitter’s search functionality. Twitter search is sadly lacking for older tweets, but as an alert feature, it functions well. Simply perform a search and save it. You can save up to 25 searches. Now when you go to your Twitter page, click on a saved search to view related tweets. If you’re using a third party application like Tweetdeck, create a separate column for the search and results will be displayed in real time. The great thing about the search feature is that it covers all Twitter users, not just the ones you’re following.

Schedule

When I first started out on Twitter, the thought of automating my Twitter account filled me with horror. That hasn’t abated, but scheduling tweets is a little different, especially with Buffer App. Buffer App allows you to set up the times you want your tweets to go out and when you come across an article or posts you want to tweet or retweet, just Buffer it and it’ll be added to the queue. This app will greatly reduce your time on Twitter without sacrificing engagement since you can hop in at any time and respond to retweets and mentions.

These are just a just a few best practices that will ramp up your productivity for a more meaningful Twitter experience.

RELATED POSTS:
9 iPad Productivity Tips
5 Google Calendar Productivity Tips
Productivity Tips for Google Docs
Dropbox Productivity Tips