In 2009, our clients requested Twitter management more than any other social media service. Managing Twitter has always presented a challenge due to the constant flood of content and noise flowing through the Twitterverse. Luckily, the past year has also given rise to more sophisticated Twitter tools that help manage this fire hose of content.

At the start of 2009, Page One PR used Twitter applications mainly to track metrics. The new crop of tools go beyond tracking and allow for actual automation of Twitter actions. In an ongoing effort to make Twitter management more efficient, Page One PR has tested dozens of these tools and narrowed the most useful ones down to a handful. We also began to develop guidelines around the use of such tools and by the end of 2009, we identified the following three areas of Twitter management that can benefit from automation:

Content Production: We’ve found two effective ways to automate the publishing of content on Twitter. The first decreases the number of times one has to stop and search for new content to tweet. Writing tweets at multiple points during the day requires more time than writing several tweets at once and scheduling the tweets to be sent automatically throughout the day. A number of free services such as HootSuite, CoTweet and SocialOomph make it easy to schedule tweets.

The other way to make Twitter production more efficient is to take advantage of material already published on a company blog, newsletter, or other source. A number of tools (e.g. twitterfeed.com) will automatically generate content from new blog posts or RSS feeds and publish it on Twitter. We do not generally use this technique because it lessens the interactive element a Twitter feed. However, it can be useful for certain types of informational feeds in which the goal is to increase clicks on a link to marketing assets, such as coupons.

Interaction with Existing Followers: We use Twitter lists and keyword searches to organize followers and responses into more manageable groups. Twitter lists can be either public or private. Make lists public if you create them for promotional purposes. Make lists private if you use them for organizational purposes. Lists and keyword searches allow you to focus on people who will either buy a product or distribute information on a product. You can then interact with those people directly. To make that interaction even easier, you can schedule customized DMs (Direct Messages) and @replies to be posted during a person’s specific business hours.

At Page One PR, we generally avoid tools that automatically DM new followers or DM large blocks of a follower base. Though the process can be refined based on keyword triggers, the effectiveness of this tactic has not been proven and may in fact annoy followers. Yet another common practice that we recommend against is automatically following your followers. Such practice weakens the community on Twitter, especially with the proliferation of spammer accounts.

Interaction with Potential Followers: Automated searches based on keywords can be used to identify potential people to follow or @reply. Most Twitter readers have keyword search features. You can either group the search results in a separate column of a reader like Twhirl or HootSuite or use other tools to organize results into lists, similar to an email inbox list.

The results of an automated search must always be followed up by human review and action. Only a human can comb through the results to identify which present real opportunities for interaction. This combination of automated search  and human review can effectively drive up the number of new followers.

As you may be able to tell from the suggestions above, we advocate a good dose of human interaction to complement any Twitter automation. While more companies these days turn to Twitter bots to automate interaction that requires no human touch (for example, auto-following all accounts found through a keyword search), we prefer to abide by Twitter’s Automation Rules & Best Practices which discourage such a high level of automation. However, though we can’t recommend complete automation of any Twitter action, we have found that even minor automation eases the work of marketers and frees up resources for other marketing tasks.

For a checklist of “DOs and DONTs on Twitter Management” with links to additional reading, visit us on Facebook.