When you log into Twitter, it seems seems like the same people are always right at the top of your feed.  How do they do it?  Do they just sit at the computer or on their phone all day, posting motivational quotes and links to their blog?

These people accumulate thousands of followers and all of the benefits that comes with them by posting consistent, valuable content.  And while it’s possible to do that as an individual, it’s a lot easier for your brand or business to manage the people and content on the site by using online tools that can help you to do it automatically.  You may have seen tweets that have been posted from an outside application, most likely HootSuite.  The reason for this is that brands with the most active social media presence will use these services to automate the delivery of their content and management of their accounts.  Many of these services also provide analytics on who’s following them and what’s effective.

Drip marketing as it is relevant to Twitter involves creating (or buying) a collection of tweets, which can be scheduled in advance using a variety of online or software tools.  The advantages in doing this are numerous.  If you’re creating original content for dozens of tweets, it may be more efficient to simply dedicate a block of time to doing that in advance rather than trying to write them on the fly.  Or, if your tweets are heavy on images or other media content, it may not always be very easy to pull those social media items together during a busy workday.  If it’s just about tweeting links to a blog or other web content, it might not be worth your time to shoot out links to the same posts every day.  Promoting events where a large audience must be reached beforehand is much more likely to be successful with multiple pre-scheduled tweets than only one message.  And lastly, if your job or business takes you away from situations where it would be convenient to tweet frequently, drip marketing on Twitter can be very useful.

The most popular Twitter client is probably HootSuite, but there are other options available to those interested in running a drip marketing campaign.  Mashable recently created a list of free and effective Twitter APIs that can be used to schedule tweets.  Feed140.com is another alternative.  Pluggio and TweetDrip have features designed specifically for running drip marketing campaigns on Twitter.  A standard feature of these services is to offer free trials or access to certain features for free in the hope of gaining a premium customer, so it’s easy to experiment and see what works the best for your brand.

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