Today I’m looking at how you can save time by scheduling tweets, drive engagement and find great content to tweet about.

Why schedule tweets?

Twitter is a very useful tool for promoting your blog or business. If you want to build a strong and engaged following you need to tweet fairly regularly, at least once a day, although more is better. Just so long as you don’t overdo it, that is. The easiest and fastest way to ensure you are tweeting regularly is by scheduling tweets. This way you can still connect with your followers when you are offline or even asleep, particularly useful if your followers are all over the world.

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How to use ViralTag

There are many apps out there that help you schedule social media posts but my favourite, especially for Twitter, is ViralTag. It is inexpensive, and if you are serious about using Twitter to promote your work or business, it is a fabulous time saver and well worth it.

Sign up for ViralTag’s FREE TRIAL

The free trial lasts 14 days giving you plenty of time to try it out, and you don’t need to give them your credit card details.

1. Connect your social profiles

Once you have signed up, make sure you are logged into your Twitter account and authorise ViralTag to access your account.

If you are trying out the light plan you can add two more accounts from either Facebook, Tumbler, Pinterest, LinkedIn or Instagram. I also use ViralTag to schedule Pins, where I want to share the same pin to more than one board but don’t want Pinterest, or my followers, to think I’m spamming. ViralTag lets me stagger when I am posting my pins.

Try using ViralTag with different social networks to see which ones you think you’ll get the most use from. If you’ve already added three, you’ll have to disconnect one to try out another but it’s easy to change back again.

2. Set your time zone

3. Add the Viraltag Extension for Chrome

I mainly use Chrome for browsing the internet and while this extension certainly isn’t essential it is useful. Click on the download link and once the download has finished you will see a red Viraltag symbol added far right on your toolbar. If you ever want to remove it right click on it and select ‘remove from Chrome’. If you’d rather not add the extension, though, just bookmark the ViralTag homepage instead.

4. Start Scheduling

Every time I publish a new blog post I use ViralTag to schedule tweets promoting that post. Here’s how.

1. 1. 1. In your ViralTag dashboard, click on the red square with the plus sign at the top left of your screen.
      2. Upload a photo from your blog post.
      3. Add the text you want to include in your tweet, including a couple of relevant hashtags.
      4. Add the URL to your blog post (or website page).
      5. Click ‘add to queue’ or, if you want to tweet it more than once, click ‘schedule’ (circled in red above) to bring up a calendar.
      6. Click on the days you want to tweet and then set the time you want it to go out. Remember to also set whether that should be AM or PM. Click the red button to schedule the tweets.

5. How often to repeat a tweet?

For each new post I schedule a few tweets spread throughout the day on the first day, one tweet a day for a week, then cut it down to once or twice a week. Be sure to mix it up with other tweets as there is nothing worse than a long feed of the same tweet and photograph repeated again and again. I also sometimes schedule tweets about the same post using a few different photographs so that my feed doesn’t look too cluttered with the same image repeated many times.

6. Use the Explore feature to find great content

The way I like to use this feature is by looking at my own RSS feed (an automatically updated list of posts) from my blog and those of my favourite bloggers for things to tweet about but you may also find the other features useful so do check them out.

1. 1. 1. Click on Explore in the left-hand column.
      2. Click on the Feeds tab.

Press the + sign to add feeds. I have found the easiest way to do this is to try typing in people’s names or their blog name under ‘topic’. If they don’t come up try removing the spaces.

Alternatively, find the URL of their feed and add that. They are sometimes simply the site’s URL, forward slash, feed e.g. ‘https://travelwithkat.com/feed/’ but they can be more complicated. To find the feed URL of a website, right-click anywhere on the website and then click ‘View page source’. Don’t be put off by all the code that comes up. Press control F to bring up the search box (command F on a Mac). Type in ‘RSS’ and the first instance of that in the code will be highlighted. Follow the line of code and you’ll find the URL of the website’s feed.

Once this is done you can easily find things to tweet about and share like-minded people’s content from their blogs.

7. Use Reports

This is a great feature for finding out the best time of day to share posts and to see which social media channels are generating traffic to your blog. Don’t ignore it. Make use of it.

You can now export your reports from Viraltag to have Social Media Analytics data on file. Go to ‘Reports’ and then ‘Analytics’. Set the date range and click ‘Export’.

There is lots more you can do with ViralTag but I think that covers all the basics for now with regards to Twitter.

Sign up for ViralTag’s FREE TRIAL

Disclosure: There are affiliates links in this blog post. If you click on one of these links and then make a purchase, I may make a little money at no extra cost to you. This goes towards the cost of running this blog, for which I am very grateful. Thank you.