If you have been following my blog for any length of time, you will know that I’m ALL about finding free products and services. Oh don’t get me wrong, I will invest in these types of things if I feel that I need something that will do more than the free services or products will provide but you will be surprised what you can find online for free if you just look, listen and learn.
Okay, so this post is about how to automate your tweets for free. But what I look for in a service is I want it to automate not only my tweets but posts to my other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendsfeed, Yahoo Profiles, MySpace and many other social networking sites.
Now I found a service that will post to all of these sites for free. I’m sure you have heard about Ping.fm. Now although this is an absolutely cool site, you can’t set up your posts or tweets to automatically be sent out whenever you want. You have to manually send them out each time. That’s the only downfall of this free program.
So I got online and started doing more research thinking that there had to be another service out there that wouldn’t charge me for this. Believe me, I found plenty that would so I was really starting to get frustrated. Until, I ran across a site called CoTweet.
What CoTweet actually does is it helps marketers and customer support professionals manage their day-to-day social media conversations from a centralized, easy-to-use dashboard. CoTweet makes it easy to track conversation trends, provide customer service, manage marketing campaigns and maximize public relations opportunities to build deeper relationships with customers and prospects and increase brand visibility.
Now that in itself is a pretty cool service. You can organize multiple Twitter accounts too. Their standard version is free but their Enterprise version you have to pay for. You can read more about what those services offer if you are interested but for what I want to accomplish, the free version will do just fine.
What I love about this service is that it connects to Ping.fm so that you can schedule your tweets and posts ahead of time and forget them for the day.
I have been religious about posting to all of my profiles several times a day. But I didn’t just want to post to Twitter and Facebook. I wanted to also post to LinkedIn, my Yahoo Profile, Friendsfeed and several other social sites. I just got tired of having to remind myself to post every couple of hours. because I couldn’t locate a service that would accomplish for free.
This is how easy this is:
- Go to CoTweet.com and sign up for a free account
- Then go to the settings tab
- Click on Twitter accounts
- Click on Integrations
- Grab Ping.fm’s API key
You will notice a link to Ping.fm underneath the API key section. Click on that link, log into your Ping account and copy the API key. Paste it into the designated space and then click on “Submit Query”. You are done.
You can set this up through different Twitter accounts as you will notice once you are in their dashboard. That’s what is so cool about this service. 
I don’t know about you, but it seems like it took me forever to find a service that would do everything I wanted for free. SocialOomph is another great service but unless you pay for their service monthly, you can’t post to any site other than Twitter. So there are plenty of other services available for free that will automatically post to your Twitter account, just no other accounts I’m afraid.
So, I hope you give this a try and let me know what you think. I am loving this service now. 2 thumbs up for sure. Have been using it for about a week now and no problems whatsoever.
Hope you find this information helpful. Now have fun with this. And don’t forget to leave me a comment and tell me what you think.
Will see you soon!
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Adrienne, awesome blog you have here. Man today is a day of first for me. I have heard of social oomph, but I have never heard of CoTweet very cool I am going to look into it now. Thanks for sharing,
Larry
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Hey Larry,
Like you, I had never heard of it either but as you read in my post, it’s a pretty cool site. I’m in love and I enjoy sharing the love when I find something that I think is just too cool… Glad I could help!
Adrienne
SocialOomph was far too confusing to navigate and sink for me. Although I liked the statistical portion of it, it just didn’t have the service on the free version that I really needed. Do you know if CoTweet has the same problem?
Hey Sam,
CoTweet isn’t the same type of program that SocialOomph is so they don’t have near the same services. I use SocialOomph for sending direct messages automatically and for posting scheduled tweets for just one of my Twitter accounts. But for my main account, I prefer sending all my posts and tweets out to all the sites I’m connected with and this is the first service I have located where you can do all of that for free. Wish I could help you with the rest but you never know, I may run across another one. Stay tuned because if I do you can bet I’ll post about it.
Adrienne
Thanks for the recommendation! Believe it or not, I’ve still been manually syncing my updates for my various social media systems – LOTS of copy/paste work, I can tell you that! This seems like it will definitely save me lots of time, I can’t believe I didn’t know about it sooner!
Twitter: adriennesmith40
August 17, 2011 at 3:41 PM
Oh you poor thing… That is very time consuming. So glad this post helped.
There are so many different services you can use that will do this automatically for free. Once I found a few of those, no more doing them by hand.
Thanks Laurie!!!
Adrienne,
I really find your post helpful. Thank you for sharing this free tool. I don’t know if you have tried Hootsuite but I also find it cool. It has good dashboard and you can interact with other people in networking sites. The basic account is free and if I’m not mistaken, you can add 5 accounts. More than that you still have to pay
So thanks again for letting us know about CoTweet.com!
Take care,
Bob
Twitter: adriennesmith40
August 18, 2011 at 9:12 AM
Hey Bob,
I am familiar with Hootsuite but the thing I like about CoTweets is that it’s connected to Ping.fm. The thing with Ping.fm is that you can share your information with a LOT of different social networking sites. The only problem with it is that you can’t automate it. With Hootsuite, you can only post to Twitter and Facebook unless you sign up with their program which costs money. With CoTweet, you have the API connection to Ping.fm which will automatically send your message out to more sites. That’s the really cool thing about this program. Plus it’s free.
So that’s my take on it and hope this helped.
Thanks Bob, always a pleasure to hear from you.