Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for businesses, but it can take a lot of time if you're not careful. I mentioned earlier some ways to save time on personal social media, but that's not going to work as well for the types of professional things you might want to do on Twitter. If you have to tweet for a business or brand (maybe you have your own home-based business), then there are ways you can save time on that too.

Your tweets will have to be professional; obviously you can't just type in the sorts of things you'd put on a personal Twitter account (e.g. "trying to cover up another pimple this morning" is not going to make you look professional!) But there is some good news: Twitter with its 280 character limit is one of the most convenient social media platforms for business. You're not expected to write War and Peace! You're there just to put up quick updates about your brand and to have a public-facing voice for your business.

Here are 4 great ways to save time:

1. Use a scheduling service to write your tweets ahead of time and tweet them automatically, like Buffer or Twuffer.
2. Set aside a bit of time each week to write a batch and schedule your upcoming tweets. If you have trouble remembering to actually do this, use a reminder service Remember The Milk (it's free for the basic plan) and have it send you an email reminder once a week.
3. When you batch and schedule as above, log into Twitter so you can reply to any tweets you receive, deal with notifications, and follow a few more people. At the same time, do hashtag searches to find a few good tweets from others that you can retweet - you don't want 100% of your tweets to be your own stuff. Depending on your business, you may need to do this more frequently than once a week. The point is, batch all of this.
4. If you run out of ideas for what to tweet, use the free business tweet generator at Focusably.

Twitter is one of the most business-friendly and least time-consuming forms of social media due to its limited number of characters. It's also one of the easiest to get people to follow back, so you'll have a much easier time making your business or brand look popular.