Your mornings are precious. Sacred “you” time (when you’re not frantically checking your email while getting dressed while planning your route to avoid traffic). And your afternoons are full of meetings, deadlines and last minute requests. Your evenings are spent either on family outings, meeting friends you haven’t seen in months, or juggling dinner with homework with some relaxation time before you have to do it all again. So where do you find the time to tweet?

As a digital marketer, your time is being stretched thinner and thinner – after all, in any given day you have to search out and test new tools, update ad campaigns, manage creatives and build community. So anything that can shave minutes or hours off your daily tasks is sure to help.

Here is a template for spending just 10 minutes a day marketing on Twitter, so you can free up your time.

Minute 1. Log on to Twitter. Check your notifications tab and respond to anyone who @mentioned you since your last 10 minute session. (Optional) Thank your followers for retweets and favorites.

Minutes 2-3. Write 2 to 5 evergreen tweets to be tweeted today.

Minute 4-6. Log on to HootSuite, TweetDeck, Buffer or a scheduling tool of your choice. Schedule the tweets you’ve just written throughout the day, either using a schedule created by your chosen tool or based on your own audience insights.

Minute 7-8. Browse your Twitter lists (which you have created in advance) for influencers, brand advocates, industry-related and other accounts to retweet and reply to. Aim for 2-3 interactions generated from your lists each day.

Minute 9-10. Using Twitter’s advanced search or a saved search from previous sessions, search for keywords related to your industry or target audience. Follow 10 accounts that use these keywords.

This schedule will keep your Twitter account active, and will allow for growth over time. However, it does need a few key items in place for it to work:

A high-level strategy

A solid understanding of your target audience

Some killer content (think pre-rendered images, videos, landing pages, etc.)

One or more relevant Twitter lists that you’ve put together (containing accounts that make strategic sense to retweet and engage with)

All of which need to be created outside these 10 minutes per day. It’s also a good idea to periodically unfollow accounts that either do not follow you back or have little strategic value.

This strategy is great for accounts that are on the smaller side, but it won’t work if you’re consistently seeing a large volume of @mentions, or if you are using Twitter for customer service. In this case, you can still apply the 10 minute strategy, but you will need to increase the time you spend reading and replying to customer tweets.

(10 minutes image via Shutterstock)