Are you having a hard time coming up with ideas of what to “tweet” to your followers? Then you are not alone. Although you should plan to create and publish a steady stream of original content related to your organization’s value proposition, there are ways you can automate the process of “curating” relevant information for your intended audiences. If done correctly, you will be providing added value to your followers, even in your sleep!

We will show you in just five simple steps how to do it:

1. Identify your target audiences and the type of content and subject matter that appeals to them; then, develop a list of five to ten keywords that are relevant to those audiences. For example, if you are in the landscaping business, some potential keywords may include gardening, BBQ techniques, patio design, landscaping, and lawn care. Be creative and go beyond your core business to included other related areas of interest.

2. You can use the Google Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search to assess the strength of your keywords or discover more relevant ones, according to the geographic location you want to to target.

4. Narrow down your list of keywords to only two or three and create ONE Google Alert for each keyword. This step is very important because this is the tool you will use to harvest relevant information from the web. Each Google Alert should be setup as an RSS feed.

4. Once you setup your Google Alerts you can use third party tools such as Twitterfeed (which is free) to automate the publishing of your tweets. All you have to do is create an account, then click on “Create New Feed”, and follow the instructions. You need to copy and paste the RSS feed created with Google Alerts and choose a few simple parameters, such as frequency of posting (don’t do it too often or you will annoy your followers).

The next step is to select the social networks you want to post the feed to (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). When you are finished click the “All done!” button.

5. Go to the dashboard on Twitterfeed and verify that your feed has been created. Click on the “Check now!” link to have Twitterfeed retrieve content from the feed and post your content to your target social network accounts. Verify in your Twitter account that the automated feeds are working (don’t do this while you sleep, of course). Repeat step 4 for each Google Alert RSS feed you have created.

That’s it! Now your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts will be in auto-pilot, generating and posting relevant content. If you took the time to identify strong keywords that appeal to your audiences you will soon see the number of followers increase. Also, if the posts are relevant, you will notice an increased level of “engagement” from your followers, who will retweet, comment upon, and share your curated content. Take advantage of this opportunity to engage with them!

In a future blog post we will show you how to fine-tune and optimize your tweeting factory.

Sweet Dreams!