You’ve set up Twitter account to engage, inform and educate. You want to drive your follower numbers to not only boost your social media presence but to try and encourage further engagement of your content through @mentions and re-tweets. With this all on your plate, it’s clear that Twitter management is a channel that can’t be dabbled in. Why?
- You will lose followers
- You will become the target of posts full of spam
- You will lose out on link-building opportunities
- Your social voice will diminish and the opportunity to attract key influences will disappear
So in order to avoid these failures happening, you need to make a proper time commitment and create good quality, share-able content otherwise people won’t follow you. However, if time is just not on your side and you can’t outsource, it’s best to block out a couple of “power hours” each week rather than spending a few minutes per day trying to manage your Twitter activity.
Here are some tips on content creation….
Good quality content will attract a loyal audience because it has all been thought through and has a consistent message:
- Create a content plan to manage what you are going to post and when. This will enable you to think ahead about what you want to say. Content thought of and posted at the last minute never sounds as good.
- Research topics using tools like Google reader to quickly see what your favourite newspapers and magazines are saying and link to the content using compelling calls-to-action.
- Brainstorm with your colleagues for tips, advice, questions, competitions, even anecdotes.
- Schedule some Tweets using tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. For example you can plan and create a series of tips, one for each day.
- Test posting/scheduling Tweets at different times of the day and days of the week like during rush-hour or later in the evenings – the results will surprise you. Try and ensure your call-to-action is relative to the frequency of your posting schedule.
- Repost articles that were posted a couple of days earlier, Tweets have a short shelf life and different Tweets are seen by different audiences.
- Re-post popular tweets to drive engagement.
- Think of events in your calendar coming up that you can Tweet about and create a teaser leading up to the event, content around the event on the day and some follow up content feeding back on how the day progressed.
- Share a hashtag and retweet relevant content.
- Search for like-minded Twitter accounts to follow and you could be followed back
- Engage with key influencers by searching for accounts with high numbers of followers and start a conversation.
The result? Better time management will win better quality posts and even more followers.
