Madalyn Sklar

How to Develop Your Monthly Twitter Plan in a Morning

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#TwitterSmarter chat with Nicky Kriel - How to Develop Your Monthly Twitter Plan in a Morning - July 11, 2019

Ever had social media block?

I totally made that phrase up, but I’m sure you’ve had moments when you didn’t know what to share on social media. As if you’re stuck without any new ideas. We wanted to explore how to overcome that barrier and ensure we never run into another block. So we asked Nicky Kriel how to go about planning Twitter content.

Nicky is a social media trainer, speaker, and author. She helps businesses leverage social media and to connect with customers and improve profitability.

Here’s a summary of our chat with Nicky.

Topic: How to Develop Your Monthly Twitter Plan in a Morning
Guest: Nicky Kriel
Format: Eight questions directed to the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: What are the benefits of planning your Twitter content?

Sometimes twenty four hours is hardly enough. That’s when planning comes in handy. When you create and schedule your content in bulk, you don’t have to worry about being consistent. You’ll always have something valuable to share, and you can block out an hour or two every day to engage in live conversations. And as Chris reminded us, those live engagements will help find your ideal audience, both online and at events. It’s just about good time management, people.

Q2: How often should you create a Twitter content plan?

It can be tricky to plan out content in advance. After all, what if you’d scheduled three months worth of content, and only later realized that it didn’t resonate with your audience as much as you’d expected?

Most of our community recommended planning for one month at a time. Nicky insisted on remembering what your audience wants and speaking to their requirements. This means you have to always be listening to your community. Follow up with conversations, set up alerts for mentions, attend chats, monitor related topics—all of these tactics will help you stay on top of your audience’s needs.

Another helpful tip Matt shared is to look through public event and holiday calendars. There’s always an international something day, every month. (July 17th is #WorldEmojiDay, by the way.) See if these events are relevant to your industry and follower base. If they are, jump on ’em.

Taking social media on a monthly basis is great—you’ll get a lot of work done without overworking yourself. But to create that content on a regular basis, you’ll need a larger guideline. A style guide, if you will. A big picture or a strategy for your social media. That way, like our friends at Pitchbox App said, you can approach each month’s content by referring to the overall plan, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Q3: What steps do you follow when creating a content plan for Twitter?

Start at the very beginning: Segment your audience. Who are they, and which categories do they fit into? You can choose by demographic, age groups, industries, gender, or any other relevant metric.

Once you have that, you can create a schedule and decide how many times a week you want to post. Then narrow down to how many times a day, and then the exact times in each day. Breaking your schedule this way gives you a clear picture of your content delivery plan and you can even shift posting times to experiment and identify the ideal time.

The next step is to fill up your calendar with the actual content. Make sure you’ve reviewed your copy, because despite our pleading, Twitter is still frustratingly silent about that edit button.

Aside from your own content like blogs, courses, ebooks, videos, and articles, include other industry related content in your posts as well. Curating and repurposing content are major elements of social sharing.

Even after you’ve scheduled your posts, it’s important to evaluate your content every day. Check your analytics, like Chris suggested, to find new people sharing similar content, explore opportunities to collaborate, and be present.

Q4: What essential types of content you should include in your Twitter plan?

What you include in your posts will, and should, vary according to your business and your audience. That said, Nicky advised that your motive should be to build trust and familiarity. You want to establish authority in your industry, and if you can consistently offer helpful content, you will automatically become the go-to resource.

Our chat regular, Vraj said calls to action (CTA) questions and answers (Q&A), links, and eye-catching images are some of the must haves in your Twitter content. He also shared an excellent mock calendar to suggest how you can vary your content throughout a month.

Q5: Suggest a few tools that can help you plan your Twitter content?

Old school isn’t dead, y’all. Look at Nicky. She said she prints out a calendar and fills it out by hand. That’s an excellent way to generate ideas, especially if you’re working with a team.

Questions like this one get a lot of great responses form our community. Here’re a few other tools people recommend:

Edit images and quotes:

  • Adobe
  • Canva
  • Pablo by Buffer
  • Quozio

Schedule tweets, monitor engagement, and overall social content management:

  • Sprout Social
  • Hootsuite
  • CoSchedule
  • Tweet Deck
  • Crowd Fire
  • Meet Edgar
  • IFTTT
  • Agorapulse

Analyse tweet performance and plan future content

  • Twitter
  • Brand 24
  • Google Analytics

Generate content ideas

  • Google Trends
  • Twitter Moments, Twitter Media, Twitter chats
  • Answer the Public
  • Other industry-related websites like Content Marketing Instituite, Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today, SEM Rush, and Hub Spot

Q6: How do you measure the effectiveness of your planned content on Twitter?

Success is subjective. And so, how effective your content is depends on your business and goals. The number of likes, retweets, and engagement can all be ideal indicators. Do more of what works, like Christian pointed out.

At the end of the day, however, it matters how much business you’ve got.

Use Twitter’s default analytics to see your content’s reach. Then as our guest said, couple it with Google Analytics to understand how many Twitter conversations and connections have converted into actual business.

Q7: Where do you find inspiration or resources for your Twitter content?

The internet, of course.

Answer the Public is a large database of questions people search every day. Just type in a topic, and it’ll give you an entire list of discussions, topics, and questions people are asking about that topic. It’s a great place to start your content research. Oh, and it’s completely free, too.

Nicky also recommended browsing through websites and blogs related to your industry, like Easil and Wave Video.

You can compile all of these great websites into a Twitter list so you’re always updated on the content they share.

Dan had another interesting suggestion: Look at public forums, listen to Twitter chats—or Reddit feeds and YouTube comments, if that’s your platform—and answer those questions. It’s a great way to meet people at their level, and connect with them instantly.

Check out the answers to Q5 for some more great resources for inspiration.

Q8: Share some tips for quickly creating high-quality Twitter content.

The best way to create content quickly is to have some templates or visuals ready for use at all times. Nicky suggested tools like Easil, Pablo by Buffer, Canva, Get Stencil, and Wave Video to create visuals and banner designs in bulk so you can attach them to a tweet and schedule instantly whenever you need to.

And to create tweets automatically, she introduced us to a tool called Lately. This way, you don’t have to painstakingly write each tweet. Missinglettr is another tool that offers the same function.

Beware, though, automation is still a risky route. See that you’ve reviewed all tweets before scheduling them.

You can also use an RSS feed to quickly find relevant and share-worthy content. Madalyn uses Buffer’s feed and Rachel from Express Writers said she uses Feedly to generate content.

Seriously, folks, when you think about the sheer number of tools out there, it’s not that hard to plan out your social media content in advance. All it takes is some dedication to proper time management.

 

That’s it, folks! I hope this recap was useful. And if you can spare an hour in your Thursday, do join us for the #TwitterSmarter chat at 1pm ET.

 

About me, Narmadhaa:

I’m a writer of all things—technical and marketing copy to fill the pocket; haiku and short stories to fill the soul. A social media enthusiast, I’m a member of the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: Personal blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

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