1. Post things that are of general interest to your readership.
2. Space your posts out so that you don't fire them all off at once.
3. Make your posts when the internet is most active.

In my personal account, I found that number one was hard because I had a varied following, and I discussed several things that may or may not be relevant to everyone. It was at this point that I decided to create a few different twitter accounts for different projects i was working on. This would allow me to post only directly relevant content to these accounts, and only aggregate them if I needed to. For instance, this blog has its own twitter account.

My problem with number two is that I didn't want to have to sit in front of my twitter client and drop in a new tweet at specified intervals. This would be much too much work, and completely curb productivity. As a result, I ended up with a bunch of tweets clustered at different times of the day.

Number 3 was a real problem. I found that I was always awake when the rest of the world was asleep. It seems like there should be no time when the entire planet is asleep, but in fact there is. That time is the time I was tweeting.

In order to combat these problems, I wrote a pile of Ruby scripts, but soon found they were getting unwieldy. They were just odd interfaces to emacs and cobbled together databases that, while they worked okay, were not very good tools for productivity.

A few days ago, I ran across Justin Vincent's article on making twitter work for you on 5 minutes a day. Expecting just an outline of the same problems I was facing, I found that the problems were not only outlined, they were solved. Justin had developed a web app called Pluggio that solves these problems, and presents a very useful interface to keep track of the results.

If the above sounds interesting to you, you really should head over there and take a look at the product. There's a 30 day free trial.

After using it for a few days, I can report that I have used to to successfully:

• Keep track of searches for hashtags to respond to.
• Continuously search for users with the same interests as me (look for 'friend finder').
• Stockpile tweets and post them on a rolling schedule (hourly in my case) and only between certain times.

While there is much for functionality to work with, these solved the problems I have been battling for years. I will keep you updated as to how these functions are working out for me in the future.