Minning the Twittterverse with minimal time

Twit­ter is one of the best and eas­i­est tools to use to crete a net­work for your business…but many artists I talk with either a) see it as a time suck b) see it as a toy for kids or c) don’t see it as part of their job description.

The biggest of the three objec­tions seems to be time suck but I think maybe they are all wrapped into one giant appre­hen­sion based on lack of knowl­edge with maybe a lit­tle fear mixed in. Just because you are afraid of being sucked into a day of twit­ter­ing and tweets doesn’t mean it will happen…yoiiu do have con­trol over how you spend your time! So today lets take a look at how you can build a viable net­work with out mak­ing it into a time suck.

The right stuff…will make the dif­fer­ence
To really make this work you’ll need a good third party appli­ca­tion like Tweet­deck, twirl or the new one. Why not use the web? Because it sucks plan and sim­ple, to much clicking,to much time wait­ing for page loads or re-loads. What makes these third party apps great is that you can speed tweet with them very eas­ily by cus­tomiz­ing the inter­face to how you work and you can make your twit­ter­ing count in more than one way.
Since I use Tweet­deck and Nambu I’m going to frame every­thing in that context.

My pri­or­i­ties

• Find con­tent worth shar­ing with my followers
• Sup­port my peeps by spread­ing link luv through RTs and #FF
• Reply to my peeps with encour­age­ment and support
• Share my own content

The when and what

Pick a time of day you are the least pro­duc­tive in what you nor­mally do, for me it’s my morn­ing cup/s. I’m nor­mally not wor­thing of doing any­thing pro­duc­tive much before 10 am so I use that time to for twit­ter­ing and no it is not 3 hours. So… I set­tle in with my java at my side and skim my twit­ter feed look­ing for inter­est­ing con­tent first from folks I have come to know. I keep an eye out for tips, retweets, ref­er­ences to web con­tent. When I find good tips I’ll click the link to save it to my browser, then retweet it so my friends get some twit­ter luv. Time spent 10–15 minutes

If you have a smart phone like an iPhone and you find your­self sit­ting in a doc’s office or wait­ing for your lunch date just fire up the appro­pri­ate twit­ter app and get to it. I use Twit­ta­la­tor Pro and Nambu and what I mostly do is mine the feed for use­ful info which I then add to my favs to check out later on Tweet deck.

You can spend even less time by lim­it­ing your self to  no more than 3 re-tweets and save the rest for another session.

Make your tweets multi purpose

Now that a lot of “con­nect” type things are sur­fac­ing almost on a daily basis  there is no rea­son not to use their con­nec­tive power to spread your net­work wider. Tweet­deck now offers Face­book sta­tus updates simul­ta­ne­ous to your tweets and if you are on Friend feed your tweets will also be picked up and spread through that network.

Focus on folks who  are use­ful to your network

Don’t spend time RTing or fol­low­ing tweeps who have noth­ing to con­tribute to your net­work or to that you care about. You don’t have to fol­low every­body who decides to fol­low you…let attri­tion take care of the spam­mers, money mar­keters and other unsa­vory char­ac­ters who bring noth­ing to your table. Focus on the tweeps you’d like to hang with.

Share good stuff

A cou­ple of times a week share some­thing you have done or find inter­est­ing, some­thing you know your peeps would like. It could be a blog you just read, or that piece you are work­ing on… Go ahead you know you are inter­est­ing oth­er­wise you have a fol­lower count of “0”!!

Here’s the drill again

• Get Tweet Deck or other 3rd party app
  
• Skim the feed
  
• RT good con­tent to your peeps
  
• Do inter­est­ing stuff off of twit­ter
  
• Share that inter­est­ing stuff
  
• BE YOURSELF