Twitter may have not been my first choice as a Social Networking tool but over the course of three months I’ve begun to see the true value in it. There’s more to Twitter than meets the eye. However, like any tool, learning to effectively use it is a process.
This is why I decided to create my Tweet Plan. A Tweet Plan is basically planning how you are going to utilize Twitter for your marketing efforts and how to best leverage your time on it.
Here are a few steps to consider when creating your Tweet Plan:
- Decide what you are going to tweet
- What day and time is best to tweet
- How often you plan to tweet
Decide what you are going to tweet
There are going to be several things to consider when determining what you are going to tweet. Make a list of what you currently tweet and add to that list. Here are a few update ideas:
Promotional Tweets – Tweets about your service, products, affiliates, etc.
Lead Generation Tweets – Tweets generated with the intention to target potential leads/prospects.
Linkluv Tweets – Retweets from fellow site owners.
Relationship Building Tweets – Tweets intended to create and nurture relationships with other users.
Blog Post Updates – Let your users know you have new content to share.
Application/Software Tweets – Suggesting applications to your followers they may find useful.
Inspirational – Share quotes, personal experiences and points of view to touch, move and inspire others.
I’m sure there’s more, but this will get you started on generating some ideas on what to tweet.
What day(s) and time(s) are you going to tweet
After some lengthy research, Fast Company determined that the best time to tweet is on Friday, 4pm EST. It’s a very interesting report and I recommend you take a look at it. However, I also think you should consider what works best for your company in particular.
Try tweeting on the same days at the same time for a week and see where you get the best response. If may take you several weeks before you can see a pattern if one should exist.
Determine how often you are going to tweet
Lets say you decide you would like to tweet out information 5 times a day, 7 days per week.
5 x 7 = 35 tweets per week
You have two options at this point – schedule your tweets daily or create and schedule all tweets for the week.
I know creating 35 tweets at once seems a lot but it actually isn’t all that bad. The 30-45 minutes spent setting it up your tweets for the week may save you more time in the long run; especially since many of these tweets will be weekly repeats. The only things that will vary are the days and times depending on your evaluations.
Once you have your tweets scheduled using your favorite social dashboard than all you have to be concerned about is relationship building and retweets.
I currently use TweetDeck which I really enjoy although I have been considering moving to Social Oomph which seems to give you more options. I will be posting a tutorial in the near future comparing the two applications.
The one definite advantage of applications such as Social Oomph and even HootSuite is that they are web-based applications as oppose to software-based ones such as TweetDeck.
So what made me decide to create a TweetPlan? As with many things in life, it generated from a simple conversation; and here it is.
There you have it ladies and gentlemen! From the mouth of the Social Media Guru himself; build relationships!
Now I’m not saying this method will work for everyone. But the lesson I took from this is this:
So the best way to deal with this is automate all the “business” stuff as much as you can and focus on the relationships. I know as an online business owner who dealt with physical products that this may be a difficult task. But if you can just begin with baby steps than maybe soon you’ll be off and running.
What do you think? Ready to create your TweetPlan?