Auto tweeting, or automatically publishing your blog posts to social media, might save you some time. But it's probably not the best thing for your marketing, and here's why.
One of the common questions we get is if you should set up your website to auto tweet once a new blog post or article is published. Auto tweeting removes a lot of the effort of writing the message and posting it to social media because the website sends the post title and link to Twitter for you.
A business news publisher recently asked me this question. They post several news articles to their website daily, and wanted to add the ability to auto tweet so they wouldn't have to create the social media messages themselves. Here's my take. I'd invite you to leave yours at the end of the article.
My advice would be not to auto-tweet the news items and articles that you're posting on your website.
Auto tweets save time, but could cost you readers
While I know this saves some time, the issue is that your ideal customer may not be online when you're posting the articles, especially if you're posting these early in the morning or after work hours.
If your goal with social media is to get exposure for your content, you're better off using a social media scheduling tool to schedule content throughout the day at the optimal times for your audience.
Schedule tweets instead
If you're too busy during the day to post to social media, consider scheduling your tweets instead.
By scheduling your Twitter posts, you can take some time to write thoughtful messages rather than just auto-tweeting the article title or subtitle. This shows that you're putting a little effort into your social media messaging.
By writing Twitter posts manually and putting the main idea of the article or a tip from the article in the tweet, you're likely to get a higher click rate unless your blog title is really enticing.
Tools for tweet scheduling
If you're going to check into tweet scheduling (and scheduling social messages on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook and others), check out Buffer or Hootsuite.
Both are free social media tools (but both have paid options for business users) that connects to your social media profiles so that you're able to set a posting schedule that's appropriate for your audience.
Then you can write and schedule the posts as you're publishing content on your website so you can get on with your day.
If you want a social media scheduling tool that integrates with your marketing and helps you interact better with prospects in your lead database, check out HubSpot (you can get a 30-day free trial and walkthrough with a marketing expert here).
It's a subscription-based tool, but offers advantages over free or even subscription services because it ties into your lead database and shows ROI.
Your turn...
- What are some of the reasons that you auto tweet?
- Have you tried scheduled tweets, and what results have you seen?
- What do you think about posting a main idea from the article rather than just the title?
