Do you ever ask yourself… "what shall I tweet about today?" Do you find yourself spending hours searching for something that might be of interest to your readers? If the question to either of the above is “yes” then you need a content plan.
When someone sees you on Twitter, they need to have a compelling reason to follow you. Take some time to read your own tweets and be brutally honest wit yourself. Do you find them interesting? Would you follow your own tweets?
Let’s say you’re an accountant. You have to give your readers a compelling reason to follow you. If you claim to save people tax, you need to prove it by putting tips on how to save money as well as useful news items on tax related issues. But you can’t just do that without giving it some thought. And that means more than finding ive minutes on a Monday morning. You actually need to block out some time where you brainstorm some ideas. It’s called having a content plan.
- Set aside an hour or two once a month, and write a daily calendar of what you’re going to tweet about during the next month.
- Plan the tips you’re going to put out each day e.g. “Today’s tax saving tip”. You can even save time by scheduling your tweets in advance using Hootsuite.
- Plan a short blog article to write each week that you can share on twitter. To save time, you can write one long article that you can break up into a series of articles.
- Polls are a great way to interact with your audience. Think of a weekly or monthly poll that you can put on your website and share on Twitter. LinkedIn makes it easy to set up and share polls.
- Set up a Google Alerts account. This is a free tool that will alert you by email whenever a relevant topic comes up in the news. All you have to do is set up a list of keywords to be alerted about. E.g. “Inland Revenue” “tax avoidance” etc.
- Set up a Google Reader account. This enables you to read all your favourite newspapers, magazines and blogs on one page. So if you’re a solicitor, you’ll mostly likely be reading the Law Gazette, the Lawyer, the Guardian Legal section, the Telegraph Legal section etc….Each of these papers has an RSS feed. By adding this feed to Google Reader, all the articles appearing on these publications will show on one page. This means that in a minute or two you can scan all the latest news stories for relevant information to tweet about.
Not only will a content plan help you put out interesting and informative tweets, it will save you time. By planning your tweets in advance, you will be able to spend as little as 5-10 mins a day on your twitter activity. No longer will you be able to make the excuse “I have no time to tweet”.
