It has been said that the retention time of a single tweet is around 22 seconds! This means that once you have tweeted something, after 22 seconds your tweet becomes buried down the pile as new tweets come through.
Have a look at your own twitter timeline and see what the activity is like. You will probably notice that new tweets come into view every few seconds! I did this with my own twitter account and here were my results:
After 30 seconds there were 4 new tweets
After 1 minute there were new 9 tweets
Obviously the more people you follow the busier your timeline becomes!
Therefore if you use twitter to update your followers on your own blog posts then once you tweet about a post there is on average only a 22 seconds window for someone to see it!
I was thinking about my own tweets of blog updates, some of which proved popular and I was wondering how I could retweet these older posts on autopilot. If people found them valuable at the time I tweeted about them, then there are plenty of other people who didn’t even see it at the time and also my new followers who would still benefit from reading these posts.
So I was looking to see if a plugin was available that would tweet older posts automatically – and I came across a great one – revive old posts (formally known as Tweet old post).
How To Install Revive Old Post Plugin
1. In your WordPress dashboard click on Plugins > Add New
2. In the search box type “tweet old post”
3. Click on Install Now and after installation remember to activate the plugin.
4. You will be able to set this plugin up by clicking on the Revive Old Post tab underneath your Settings tab on the left hand side of your dashboard.
5. Click on Revive Old Post again to set up the details.
6. You will need to connect your Twitter account. Click on Add Account and authorize this plugin with your Twitter account. (if you want to use this plugin to update Facebook and LinkedIn then add those details as well. I am only use it to update Twitter so I shall just focus on that.
7. Next decide how you want your Post Content described. I have chosen to use the title only. This is because Twitter is limited to only 140 characters showing so I don’t want the description added as this is too long for a tweet.
8. Leave the other settings as default until you get to the Use URL Shortner. It is a good idea to use one because it means that you will use less characters and therefore it is much more likely that the whole of your tweet with URL will be visible.
I use Bit.ly as my URL shortener. Scroll down if you want to know how to set up bit.ly.
9. Another great thing about this plugin is that it enables you to tweet with relevant hashtags. I have set mine up to tweet including the #informationmarketing hashtag. Choose one that will be relevant for all of your blog posts.
10. The next thing to decide on is how often you want your old blog posts to be shared. Currently I have set mine up to post every 6 hours. Have a look at your Twitter schedule and see if there are any gaps when you are not tweeting. You can use this plugin to fill those gaps and engage with an audience that you otherwise had no visibility with.
11. Now decide how old you want a post to be before it is tweeted again. It might depend on how long your blog has been going for.
12. You can also specify how many posts are tweeted at a time. I think one at a time works well – the purpose is not to overdo your tweeting but to enhance it and increase your exposure to a wider audience.
13. You may want to share your old posts more than once or instead reset the plugin every now and again. It will depend on how many posts you have. Remember that if you are posting regularly (and you should be!) you will continually increase the number of posts that can be retweeted using this plugin.
14. One of the last things to decide is the type of posts you want tweeted. Generally you will not want pages added to the schedule since they often contain just legal information. You can remove specific posts from the schedule if you want to (see later).
15. It is a good idea to have Google Analytics turned on so that you can see which posts are engaging with your audience the most. This gives you ideas on further content you can write about.
16. The final part of this settings page is to exclude certain categories from the schedule. You would want to exclude categories that are not evergreen for example.
Check Your Preview
Click on the Sample Post Preview to see what your tweets will look like. You will also be able to check if your URL shortening service is working correctly.
Once you are happy with the settings and preview you can click on Save.
A tweet will be posted within 15s and then it will go onto the schedule that you have set it up with.
Excluding Specific Posts
To remove specific posts from the schedule click on Revive Old Posts > Exclude Posts.
You will see a list of all of your posts showing. Go through them and decide which ones you don’t want added to your tweeting schedule. Once you have gone through them you will see a list of post ID’s that are excluded.
Using Bit.ly URL Shortener
Bit.ly is a free service that provides you with a shortened URL that you can use that will redirect visitors to your original website URL specified. Often blog post URLs are quite long so using a short version helps when it comes to tweeting.
Also you can get statistics of traffic to your bit.ly URLs within your Bit.ly account.
1. Create an account with Bit.ly – you can sign in using your Facebook, Twitter or email address.
2. To find out the details that you need for this plugin you need to go to your settings page.
3. Along the top click on the Advanced tab. If you then scroll down to the bottom of that page you will find your Legacy API Key details.
4. Copy your Login and API key details and add them to the plugin settings within your WordPress dashboard.
= API key