After a while, you may grow tired of micromanaging your Twitter network for job searching or of finding enough content to send at just the right times. That’s where Twitter automation tools can come in handy. Just don’t use these to replace real human engagement.
Rather, if they can help you shed a few minutes from your online time, then go for it. Here is a list of some helpful tools. Just don’t go overboard, as too much automation can make you look impersonal.
Justunfollow: One of the nicest Twitter network management tools, the service tells you who didn’t follow you back, which Twitter accounts haven’t been active in a while, and even who unfollowed you. You can use this information to cull your friends and balance off that all important friends/follower ratio.
Although the free version is quite limited on how many people you can follow or unfollow, the $10/month version may be worth the time you save building a great network. In particular, with the paid account you can automatically follow back anyone who followed you, something you’d probably have to do by hand anyways.
Followerwonk: This tool combines useful analytics with easy follow buttons. For example, you can analyze your own network to see what days of the week you get more followers. Use this info to decide when the best Twitter day for you is.
You can also analyze anyone else’s network and get a list of who follows them. In this way you can follow people who also follow to key influencers in your field of work.
Buffer: If you’re using Twitter just ten minutes a day, you don’t really want all of your tweets to come out all at once. You can use Buffer to automatically time your posts and even out your broadcasts. This is particularly helpful when sharing articles.
paper.li: This topical aggregation service analyzes your network’s more popular tweets and puts them into an attractive magazine-style website. This aggregated content is then tweeted to your network weekly or daily. Not only can it help you see what’s trending in your network, but the people who wind up there are flattered that you retweeted them.
Hootsuite: In addition to doing a great job managing and organizing your incoming tweets and interactions, Hootsuite also offers a wide array of automation tools. For example, you can use it to schedule tweets to send out later.
You can import an RSS feed to automatically tweet for you. You can even upload a spreadsheet of pre-written messages and their times for a batch of scheduled tweets. Finally, the tool offers comprehensive reporting so you can track network growth and even the popularity of some tweets over others.