Do you use a social media schedule for your blog? If not, you need to be. Scheduling social media makes life so much easier in the long run. The only problem is, how do you make a social media schedule? I’ll say right off the bat, it’s hard. Making a social media schedule is a long process, lots of waiting and watching numbers. Today, we’re going to talk about twitter.
I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t have a twitter schedule for a long time, and when I did start one, it was really bad. I’ve been using buffer to schedule out my tweets and they have this feature where you add a time to the schedule, write a tweet and add it to your queue and buffer will send it out when it’s time. Well, I was letting buffer tell me when to schedule tweets, not vice versa.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to find a twitter schedule that really works for people, at least people with bigger followings. This schedule had posts every hour. 24 tweets a day. I tried that for a while, but my following isn’t as big, and most of the people who actually follow me, they aren’t bloggers. So, I watched for a week as my follower number dropped from 735 to 726. Which meant it was time to cut back.
Looking at the schedule I had, I cut back on a few things. I’m not tweeting my day’s post as many times and I’m not retweeting as many things during the day. I’ve only been trying this new schedule for a few days, so I can’t tell you how effective it is, but I’m optimistic. And the great thing is, whenever I feel like I can add tweets, it’s so easy.
So, now that I’ve given you my crazy twitter schedule backstory, let’s talk about some tips for creating your own.
- Share others’ posts a lot. Out of nineteen posts that I have scheduled throughout the day – twelve of them are retweets from other people.
- Share old content. There’s one point in the day I can throw in any post from the past that I want. Just because your content is old, that’s no reason it can’t have some loving!
- Share that week’s posts. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a tweet to a blog post, but didn’t have the time to read it and when I go back to find it, it’s impossible to find. Someone once told me that the life of a tweet is only twenty minutes, so once you miss it, it’s gone. So, even after you tweet that post, keep going throughout the week – someone may come back Saturday to read all your posts and it’s a lot easier to find them when they’re at the top of your twitter feed.
- Most importantly: Keep in mind your twitter following. I said before that a lot of my twitter following isn’t bloggers. Some are authors, some are college friends. I don’t want to overexpose any of them and make them feel overwhelmed. If you have an audience that typically sleeps normal hours (not college kids), there’s no point to have tweets going out at night unless you have a huge following and know a good chunk is awake. You need to be able to read your following and cater to them while still pushing out your content. Be conservative at first and build as you grow on twitter.
What are some of your twitter schedule tips?
[Tweet “Social Media: Creating a Twitter Schedule”]