Many Twitter users are actively tweeting but at the same time wondering whether or not it is doing anything for their business. It is important to adopt a strategy in order to avoid haphazardly tweeting at all hours of the day about everything from what you had for breakfast to news in your industry and in order to achieve this, a tweet plan is recommended. A tweet plan is simply a series of scheduled tweets used in conjunction with your real-time tweeting. The tweets in your tweet plan should be carefully put together to target your preferred audience with the desired result that every day you consistently brand your Twitter presence and attract the attention of the people you want to reach, providing them useful information. Tweets can be scheduled in advance so it makes sense to write them in batches when you have the time. The following steps will help put your tweet plan together:

Twitter strategy

  1. Select your preferred audience – before you begin drafting your tweet plan, give some thought to who you want to connect with on Twitter since there are many different types of people who could help your business.  You will probably have best results if initially you choose just one or two of the following suggestions: prospects, clients, referral sources, joint venture partners, business network and suppliers’ network.
  2. Decide tweet frequency – before writing your tweets, you need to decide how many timeless tweets you want to publish each day and your decision should be based on your current Twitter presence and how many real-time tweets you usually send each day, your audience and what they like. The tweet plan’s main purpose is to get you on the radar of the people you are most interested in reaching but you still need to engage with your audience so don’t make the mistake of relying solely on the scheduled tweets in the tweet plan to connect with people and expect to build your business. In addition to timeless tweets you still need live tweets to engage with people since live tweets help you to connect with people in a way that brings them beyond Twitter and leads them along the path you want to take with them.
  3. Decide on plan longevity – After deciding how many tweets you want to put in your tweet plan each day, you need to decide how many weeks you want to run your tweet plan and schedule tweets in advance.  Again, this will depend on certain business factors and your audience.  The two important considerations are how much time you have and how quickly you can process the feedback you get from your audience to include in your next tweet plan
  4. Keyword research – use keywords in your tweets to send a consistent signal to tell others who you are, how you want to connect with them and what you want to talk about. When choosing the keywords to use in your tweet plan, remember your preferred audience, the people you most want to connect with on Twitter and importantly you want to use the keywords they use. The easiest way to write your tweet plan is to choose the number of keywords to      correspond with the number of scheduled tweets you want to publish each day. So if you decide on 5 daily tweets in your tweet plan in Step 1, you should try to come up with 5 keywords. This means your scheduled tweets will provide your preferred Twitter audience with useful information every day on each of these 5 keywords. Suggestion: When choosing your keywords, keep Twitter’s 140 character limitation in mind. Use short words or word strings.
  5. Vary the format – you will be able to write many timeless tweets on the same keywords when you use different formats and another good reason to use different formats when writing your timeless tweets is to add variety since you do not want your Twitter feed to become boring. The following are examples of different formats you could use:
    • Relate a problem – qualifying questions
    • Present a solution – business tips
    • Focus on benefits – definitions
    • Useful links to my blog
    • Fun links – market research questions
    • Resource links – useful 3rd party resources
    • Quotes
  6. Write your timeless tweets – you want to write your tweets to provide your preferred audience with the information they are most interested in therefore each tweet must be unique content because Twitter does not allow duplicate tweets. This next step of writing a series of unique tweets is simple if, for each tweet, you keep your preferred audience in mind, use one of your keywords, and use one format to write your tweet. Remember to include hashtags and limit your tweets to 120 characters to make it easy for others to retweet.
  7. Choose your times – you don’t want to publish all of your scheduled tweets at once as this does not look “natural” in your Twitter feed and you would only reach the audience online at that time.  Ideally you want to spread your tweets out throughout the day and you will also be publishing the majority of your tweets in real time.  By spreading out your scheduled tweets, they will appear in between the other tweets in your Twitter feed.
  8. Schedule your tweets – Now it’s time to schedule the publication of your tweets at the times you have chosen. There are many tools available to do this but the two most popular ones are SocialOomph and Hootsuite.

If you have any questions with regard to using Twitter for your busiess or if you would like more information on social media marketing please contact us at info@webwisemarketing.xyz