People are weary of Twitter lately and don’t exactly know what to do and how to use it, so I want to present to you a nice and easy method to use several twitter accounts to drive some targeted traffic to your site.
Here’s a test I did some time ago and what it achieved during the time it ran:
Mention was sent to 22.000 people. Also keep in mind that some of the 18k hits I got are probably robots and not actual humans, however a big percentage are human. All in all a decent result considering I didn’t push it that much. Let me show you the setup.
Initial setup:
For this you’ll need 10 twitter accounts ( at least - I usually do this in batches of 10 as it’s easier)
In order to keep your accounts safe you will have to set them up so they do all sorts of actions, if you only do mentions they will stick out and they will easily be banned. By setting all the tools to run first you’ll also have some nicely grown twitter accounts on top of the traffic from the mentions in o time.
So here’s how to do it :
- start the follow tool, low to moderate settings depending on how fresh your accounts are, max 300 follows per day should do it ( if they are completely new make that 150 and grow gradually)
- start the follow back tool
- start the unfollow tool, I usually set it to unfollow 7-8 days after the initial follow with a max of 350 per day ( again, 150 - 170 if accounts are fresh)
- start the favorite tool, pick some good sources for your niche ( you will use these for the retweet as well ) set it to like a max of 50-100 per day ( start with 25-50 if account is new ). Also I usually keep a maximum of 700 likes, but that’s up to you
- start the retweet tool, set it to retweet 4-6 times per day, use the same sources as for the like tool, also pick fresh tweets, less than 72 hours or so, skip @ tweets and use real time results.
Now that you set all this up on one account copy all the settings for all the tools to the other accounts as well. If you added a lot of good sources for the retweet and favorite tool it’s ok to use the same ones for all accounts, if you want to be a little paranoid you can go and pick different sources for each account though.
Now you’ll need to create a destination list with all these 10 accounts. Name it “Mentions 1” or similar if you’re going to create more of them.
Next create a standard campaign, call it “Twitter Keepalive 1” or similar . This campaign will further hide your actions by constantly posting stuff on your accounts.
Settings for the “keepalive” campaign:
- overview advanced settings - enable " when publishing send one post for each destination"
- overview advanced settings - enable “choose a random post from the post list”
- overview advanced settings - enable “make images unique before they are posted - medium”
- what to publish - I usually add 15-20 really good rss feeds in the same niche as the accounts, if you want to grow the accounts for other purposes as well you can add posts manually too, however having many good rss feeds will provide with a lot of fresh high quality posts constantly wihout the need of your intervention
- where to publish - the destination list with the 10 accounts that we previously created
- when to publish - randomize publishing timers each day and also randomize number of posts each day between 10-30
Here’s how my settings look ( keep in mind that I’ve been doing this for some time with these accounts)
And this is it with the “keepalive campaign” . Don’t forget to START this campaign before you move to the next step.
Also, in case you don’t know your way around rss feeds and where to get good ones here are some ideas:
http://mpsocial.com/t/top-5-post-sources-for-your-campaigns/3918
Now we need to create the actual campaign that will send the mentions.
So create another campaign - this time a volume one, call it “Mention 1” or similar with the following settings:
- overview advanced settings - enable “choose a random post from the post list”
- overview advanced settings - enable “disable minimum 30 minutes between posts”
- what to publish - nothing you’ll be sending your mentions to this campaign
- where to publish - choose the same destination list
- when to pubish - maximum post list items per day 350, publish on 1 random destinations, wait around 30 seconds.
Here’s how my settings look for this campaign :
Also, very important, the settings for the when to publish tab:
Before we move further, I want to pause a little and talk to you about the settings in the what to publish campaign. From what you can see this campaign will publish 350 mentions per day with 10 accounts so that means 35 mentions per day with each actual account.
That is not a lot, true, but it’s what will keep you under the radar, combined with the other normal posting and the actions the tools are doing these accounts will look like completely normal accounts.
Of course you can have that limit higher if you want, it’s up to you to test and grow it as much as you want, you’ll probably be safe with at least double that amount. My idea was to also keep the accounts safe and growing on auto-pilot which pretty much happened, 1-2 were banned over the course of 6 months, but I just added new ones.
###Preparing and sending the mentions
Now that we have all the initial setup done - which by the way you only need to do once, you’ll start with the actual mentions.
Pick your niche, go to twitter and find good accounts in that niche. Try to find accounts that are highly active with a lot of active followers, the followers should be in the range of 10k-30k, I’ve found that those worked the best.
Once you have a list of 5-10 accounts like I described above, go to the tools tab, click on any twitter account and go to the Mention tool of that account.
Enter the list of accounts in the “Extract members tab” , set the "scroll the search page for " to 1200 seconds and click on “Extract members”
When it’s finished extracting, go to the “Use members” tab and you should see something like the following:
As you can see I’ve extracted a little over 20.000 people, click select all, underneath add the message you want to send and once ready below that select the campaign where you want to send these mentions - that should be “Mention 1” that we created above and click “Send to campaign”.
Before we move on I want to take a minute and talk about the importance of creating a good message. Don’t just mention people with stupid or spammy messages or it will get you in trouble. Create highly spun messages, that make sense and would make the person getting it want to see what it’s about. Create a connection with him/her, as you can see you can use tokens to add his/her name in the message, do that.
If you don’t already know how to create good spins here are a few good resources :
http://mpsocial.com/t/guide-modular-deeply-nested-spintax/5197
http://mpsocial.com/t/guide-spinning-for-advanced-users/170
Once you’ve sent the mentions to the campaign that will actually send them, go to that campaign ( we named it “Mention 1” ) and start it.
Now you should have most of the tools started and 2 campaigns one for regular posting and one doing the mentions. Good luck you’ve just set you first mention campaign. Sit back and relax, this campaign should send mentions to you for a long time.
When you want more, just repeat the final step and send more mentions to the campaign. Just make sure to use the same twitter account for the extraction process as it keeps track of who you mentions and you can skip mentioning that person again just to be on the safe side.
Now you know the exact steps I take to both keep my accounts safe and send mentions with little to no problems from Twitter. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!