A lot of companies always say to us that they find that Twitter is “a waste of time” or say that they “don’t see any results”. I do understand where they are coming from however, there are a lot of things that businesses can do to use Twitter to their advantage. Scheduling your tweets in advance is a great place to start, enabling you to optimise your time and see more rapid growth.
Why Should I Be Scheduling Tweets?
1. Save Time
Scheduling tweets can feel like a lot of work at first, but it can save you so much time on a day to day basis.
With “housekeeping” tweets out of the way, you can make time to interact, join that Twitter chat you’ve been meaning to check out, and search for trending topics or conversations you can be having with industry peers or customers.
2. Reach a wider audience
Scheduling tweets can take the pressure off of having to be glued to your phone or desktop at your optimal times in order to reach your audience.
It also allows you to test tweeting at times when you may not even be awake and reach people on the other side of the world from you.
3. Stay consistent
Last, but not least, scheduling tweets can help you stay consistent. Twitter moves at a faster pace than any other social media network. This means you may have to show up a little more often, which can be more of a challenge to keep up with. Scheduling your tweets in advance takes the pressure off.
What Tweets Should I Schedule?
Scheduling tweets can free up time so you can actively participate in the Twitter community and build a strong brand on the network.
The tweets you end up scheduling should be the ones that will drive traffic or promote your business initiatives. You can also schedule “lifestyle” type tweets to increase your exposure on the social media network. Here is a short list of tweets you can set and forget.
1. Promotional tweets
If you have an upcoming initiative in your business, go ahead and schedule your promotional tweets in advance.
Setting up these tweets ensures that the word is out without the pressure of having to remember to send these tweets out every time.
2. Evergreen content
Evergreen content is great material for scheduling tweets. You can repeatedly drive traffic back to blog articles, contact pages, mailing list sign-ups, products, or any other part of your website. Just make sure that every tweet you schedule is original– that way you can stay on the right side of Twitter’s new rules.
3. User-generated content and retweets
If you want to show extra love to your followers and fans on Twitter, try scheduling shout-outs to people posting about your brand by retweeting or reposting content they are sharing about you.
4. Text and quote tweets
Text only tweets are not dead! Remember to sprinkle in some text-only tweets into your scheduling. Text tweets still draw engagement on Twitter, so don’t completely overlook them. You can also schedule quote tweets in advance. Want to give them an edge? Create an image in the Canva app and add it to your tweet.
How to Schedule Your Tweets
So, we discussed what kind of tweets you should schedule. Now let’s look at how to do it…
1. Check your analytics for the best times to tweet
You’re going to start this process by checking your Twitter analytics to see what times of the day your audience is active on Twitter. These peak times will determine when you’ll publish your most important tweets.
Use your peak times to publish value-added tweets, tweets that drive traffic back to your website or landing page, or tweets that help you engage with your audience. You can try tweeting at the general “good times to tweet” but there is nothing like getting to know your audience specifically. Each brand and each account are completely different and learning your specific times will only help you reach the most people in your audience.
2. Choose a scheduling tool
After creating your tweets, and figuring out your audience peak times, you’ll want to choose a tool to help you with scheduling all those tweets.
You can technically now use Twitter (via the ads> creatives dashboard) to do so, but I love how easy Agorapulse and Hootsuite can make the tweet scheduling process.
Here are the simple rules I follow when I set up my Twitter schedule...
1. Schedule but don’t forget about live engagement
You don’t want to come off like a robot– so please make time to go in and interact with other accounts. Reply to mentions, participate in Twitter chats, re-tweet in real time, and join conversations.
2. Test different tweet formats
Like I mentioned earlier in the article, make sure to mix up your content. Ask questions, use text-only tweets, use some tweets with GIF’s every once in a while, and lastly try to create tweets with Twitter’s built-in tools like Moments, Twitter Polls and Lists.
3. Test different tweet times
Following your peak times is great but test scheduling tweets for odd hours as well.
4. Mix in some content from others
To have a well-rounded presence you should share content from other sources. This can be other industry experts, influencers, publications that make sense for your industry, and user-generated content.
5. Find the right frequency
Test different post frequencies to see how well – or not – your account does. Each account is different, so posting less often may actually be more beneficial to your brand or business.
6. Get creative and show your personality!
Take full advantage of Twitter’s 280 character limit. You can create list posts, include multiple links in one post, or just use all the room to tell longer stories.
If you guys have any questions about Twitter, social media or marketing in general, drop me an email – aaron.jones@socialswagger.co.uk