Hacking Premium Twitter Tools

The great thing about using a spreadsheet (besides the fact that I just generated more than $1,000 a year of value in terms of cash savings for you) is that if you’re following a large number of 30–50 different blogs, it can get challenging to find time and prioritizing what to read.

The secret is to add a little colour into the spreadsheet. With a bit of conditional formatting, the posts that are performing well will automagically jump out at you.

Not only do you have the big picture of how “content” is performing across different social media channels, you get to zoom into the detail wherever you want.

For example, I had no idea how Moz vs Kissmetrics vs Content Marketing Institute vs Social Media Marketer performed relative to each other. I was also not aware of how individual writers would perform.

Or much Jeff Bullas’ content gets shared versus other well-known writers (e.g. Neil Patel — except that that’s not a fair comparison; Neil is a better writer, writes across multiple publications and writes A LOT; whereas Jeff hardly ever writes his own content despite the fact that it always says Jeff Bullas #socialmedia #socialmediamarketing #SMM. Well, it sure is a great personal brand he’s built).

Note: Take the Net Present Value of the cash savings over the next X years until you retire and go buy yourself nice new a car this weekend.

2. How to Hack Twibble.io / Twitterfeed – with ability to curate and no one’s branding but your own — FREE

Once you’ve identified what you want to share, it’s a simple modification of the spreadsheet to then craft the tweet. Use this to publish posts from your favourite blog RSS, similar to Twitterfeed or Twibble.io, but with the ability to curate (i.e. choose which tweets you want to go out) and personalise each and every single one of them. The main issue that I have with these feed distributors (and the celebrities on Twitter that use them) is that if you are not careful, it becomes very clear if someone is using a feed distributor to tweet for them — because if they only put one feed on it, all their posts start and end with the same hashtag. #NEW gets boring after a while (see the tweets in the last block below). Or a few days of absence on Twitter filled with nothing but the silence of a string of consecutive quotes from Tweet JukeBox.

With Blockspring, you can build a spreadsheet that allows you to add your own comments, the author, the publication and a hashtag (see columnns in blue to the right). Tweets that are above 140 characters are auto-flagged in pink.

3. Personalise with your own style, comments, branded hashtags, emoji — FREE

What if you could choose which feed items to include / exclude AND add your own personal commentary for colour and strategic hashtags for real or automated engagement?

I judge the quality of my tweets by how much I can squeeze into 140 characters. An optimal tweet is one where I’ve put in my comments, #POWERPOST, #LOVEIT, some emoji for colour and emotion, a strategic hashtag that gets me retweeted by bots or listed and appropriate credit given to both the original author and the publisher.

Who says you can’t have fun being constrained to 140 characters.

Save as .csv and upload to Buffer!

4. Include Publishing Entity AND look up the individual writer’s Twitter Handle — FREE

Including a reference to the original writer is just good Twitter manners — writers like to and should be credited with their work especially if it gets published by a well known publisher like Entrepreneur or Inc.

If you want amplification, cite the original writer. Young, up and coming writers who have a larger audience are the most likely to retweet you if you say something nice about their post.

If you use a URL shortener like Bit.ly or Buffer, the source is obscured so you definitely want to add the publishing entity. Your followers are more likely to like or retweet you its shows that it’s from Social Media Examiner vs a writer they may not have heard off.

Bloggers are way more polite and engaging than journalists and are significantly more likely to engage with you.

Old journalists like it if you dig up really old “classics” they published years ago that still resonate today.

They don’t reply with a nice Thank You every single time, but that’s probably a good thing as it means that they know who you are.

5. How to Hack TweetDis – send the tweet anytime, anywhere from your spreadsheet — FREE

See that tweet in the very first row? Sent using Blockspring from my spreadsheet.

Oh I didn’t add any emoji. Let’s try again. But what should we tweet?

The conditional formatting allows you to zoom in on the most shared posts with laser sharp focus. Go straight to the bottom two.

Video. We like Video. Video will be big in 2016.

But that wasn’t very smart either — since I am not using a URL shortener, I didn’t need to include @smexaminer. That’s a whole 11 characters, 2 WORDS that I could have used to say something else.