Twitter is a powerful beast, but a time consuming one.

Twitter is all about brevity. Keep it short and simple… because you have no other choice! The trouble is there are 25 million other people on the site doing just the same as you.

The key to escaping the Twitter Trap is to automate your Twitter account.

Some Easy Ways To Automate:

.

.

1. Automate Adding Followers

The most popular form of account automation on Twitter is to automate adding followers. Some software (robot) goes off and follows people for you, and you wait for them to follow you back.

It’s a very simple concept. You can automatically follow Twitter users by:

* searching by keyword
* searching by location
* searching by followers
* searching by following
* and a few other options

This means you can follow people in just about any niche, and you don’t have to do anything except press GO!

2. Automate Unfollowing

If you are following people with a friend adder then you’ll also need to unfollow people from time to time. The same TwitterAdder software will help you cull your Following list.

Let’s say you follow 100 new people on Day 1, and you set the software to unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back, but only after 7 days. This gives pepple a long enough chance to reciprocate. On Day 7 perhaps 40 of them haven’t followed you back. That’s ok. Just press Go and they will be removed.

If you are using twitter to market then you don’t need to be following anyone who isn’t following you. This keeps your Following-to-Follower ratio nice and low, so you don’t get flagged as a spammer.

3. Automate posts

There are 3 main ways to automate your Twitter posts.

1. Schedule them for future posting
2. Trigger posts from other sites
3. Hire someone else to run your Twitter profile.

I’m going to ignore number 3 because it is rare and expensive. I’ll focus on 2 and 3.

Scheduling:

You can schedule as many posts for the future as you wish with a number of services. My favourite are SocialOomph and FutureTweet. With FutureTweet you get to schedule recurring tweets, which is something you have to pay for with SocialOomph. Other than that socialoomph is superior in a lot of ways.

You can schedule Xmas messages, your favorite quotes, your website links, etc.

Triggering Twitter Updates:

When you do something on another site, like publish an article or upload a photo, you can often have it automatically send a post to your Twitter account.

Here are some examples-

When you publish a new Squidoo lens you can automatically Tweet the link.

You can automatically post a link to every new article you publish at EzineArticles.

Every newsletter you send out via Aweber can be automatically Tweeted too!

The list is literally huge. Thousands of websites are perfectly happy to help you promote your new stuff on Twitter, so you can keep your Twitter account up to date just by linking them together and carrying on just like before.

Special Mention: RSS to Twitter

If you have a blog, or a modern website, or a photo uploading account, or any kind of profile on a Social Networking site, you will already have many RSS feeds to your name. An RSS feed is just a way for content you post somewhere to make it’s way automatically somewhere else.

With the website TwitterFeed.com you can link any RSS feed to your Twitter account. This is truly “working smart” because work you have done somewhere else, like writing a blog post, automatically gets promoted to your twitter followers without you having to do a thing!

Setting up all your RSS feeds in TwitterFeed won’t take you very long, and you won’t ever have to think of them again.