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Turbo Tweeting

This is the easiest way to schedule tweets to Twitter. If you want to seriously start building traffic to your web site then regular tweets are essential. First, make sure you have curl installed. cURL is often already present in Linux distros but Windows users will need to locate and install it. The command is very simple which can be placed in a shell script (Linux) or a batch file (Windows). This can then be scheduled as you wish - I suggest you don't over do it, the same message every minute will not be posted as it will be identical to your previous one and Twitter will reject it. Keep repeated messages a few minutes apart. Right, down to the nitty gritty. The command is fundamentally straight forward:

curl -u username:password -d status="Lets's have a good old tweet. http://goodoldtweet.twt" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

The username:password is fairly obvious - just replace it with your own Twitter account login details. The text following -d status= is your tweet message (I included my blog url). See below Sponsored Links

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Now, this produces output to the screen and is helpful when you want to know that the command has worked and what it did. However, this is no good if you want to automate the command. Screen output will cause an error in scheduled running of scripts and applications. Fortunately there is a way around this. I shall show you how to do this in Linux as I currently don't know the equivalent in Windows (it may be the same in Windows but don't count on it).

curl -u username:password -d status="Lets have a good old tweet. http://goodoldtweet.twt" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml > /dev/null 2>&1

This makes sure that all output is cleanly dealt with without causing errors. The shell script in which you place the command can now be scheduled as you wish.