Planning Your Twitter Content Strategy

If you’re ready to step up your game on Twitter, you need to have a smart strategy in place.

Having any kind of social media strategy allows you to ensure the time and effort you’re putting into your presence on each platform will be fruitful. No one wants to pour all of their energy into creating content only for it to fall flat.

With a strategy, you stand a better chance at seeing the results you desire in terms of generating brand awareness, increasing engagement, and earning conversions.

So, how do you create a Twitter content strategy that will be successful? This post shares 10 tips that will help you become more intentional with how you use Twitter.

Planning Your Twitter Content Strategy

Each of these steps is essential when it comes to crafting your strategy, so don’t skip any of them! Let’s dive in.

1. Set Goals to Get the Most Out of Twitter

The first step in creating your Twitter content strategy is to set goals for what you’d like to get out of the platform. What are you trying to accomplish by being on Twitter? For example, you might be using it as a way to generate more awareness for your brand or to boost sales in your business. The point is, knowing what you want out of Twitter helps you use it effectively.

Not only that, but it’ll tell you which metrics are most important to measure. How will you know if the content you’re sharing is keeping you on track to reach those goals? Depending on what you’re working toward, certain metrics inside your analytics will matter more to you. And if you aren’t making the progress you want, you’ll know to change something about your strategy.

2. Review Your Analytics to Better Understand Your Audience & Content

On the topic of analytics, they’ll really come in handy for gaining a better understanding of what your audience wants content-wise. When you experiment with different types of content, you can check your analytics to see how well it performed in terms of impressions, replies, and click-throughs. The content that is consistently performing the best is what you should be posting more of so it has a higher likelihood of being seen.

3. Determine Your Best Times to Post & How Often You’ll Tweet

By knowing your optimal posting times, you can increase impressions on your tweets, which is important since they only have a lifespan of 18 minutes. If you’re going to share something really good, you want to make sure it stands a better chance at getting in front of a large portion of your audience.

So, the smart tactic is to post your best stuff during those optimal times. Once you figure out when your audience is often on Twitter, you can add those times to whatever third-party scheduling tool you choose to use. This way, you’ll always have fresh tweets being published during those times, getting you noticed and increasing activity on your account.

Now, the question is… How do you determine your optimal posting times? Well, there’s plenty of helpful research online that shares general times that seem to work across the board. You can test these times for yourself and see how the content you share performs. You may also want to experiment with other posting times just to see what works for you. In the graphic below, you can see some popular times to post on Twitter according to SproutSocial.

SproutSocial recommends tweeting on Wednesday from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m., while Tuesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. works well too.

4. Start Creating Content That Will Appeal to Your Target Audience

You’ve set your goals. You have an idea what your audience would like to see from you. And you know your optimal posting times. Now, you need to start creating content so you can begin writing and filling up your scheduler’s queue with amazing tweets.

Create content that’s relevant to your brand and that you know will be of service to your target audience. Address their pain points and provide solutions to their strugglers. Offer tips and tricks that they can implement. Allow yourself to get creative here!

5. Use Keywords and Hashtags to Boost Discoverability

If you’re going to put all this work into developing your Twitter content strategy, you obviously want to increase your chances of having your content discovered. This includes being discovered by other Twitter users, as well as search engines.

Search engines and people looking for specific content on Twitter will be more likely to find you when you use specific keywords in your tweets. For example, if you’re linking to a blog post on your website, mention the blog’s focus keyword in the copy of your tweet so people can find it when they’re searching for content on that topic. The same goes for hashtags, which you can see in the data below.

Buffer revealed that tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without. However, you only want to use one or two hashtags in each tweet, no more than that.

6. Post a Mix of Content to Keep Your Account Fresh

Part of your Twitter content strategy should be striving to try new, different things with the content you’re sharing. Instead of sharing just a bunch of tweets with links back to your blog, what else can you post that would get attention from your audience? Consider filming short videos for your Twitter feed or asking questions through polls, for example.

You can even incorporate features like Twitter Spaces as part of your strategy. Sometimes you have to look beyond the main Twitter feed and find other ways to stand out from the crowd.

7. Repurpose Content You’ve Already Shared

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel with the tweets you share. You can always repurpose content you’ve posted in the past because a chunk of your audience probably didn’t see it the first time around. To keep it fresh, you can always tweak the copy of your tweet and add different imagery. You’ll then be able to compare how it performed this second time around compared to the first. See if you can notice any differences that may indicate what your audience responds best to.

8. Use Twitter Lists to Help Find Curated Content to Retweet

Your Twitter content strategy does’t have to just consist of content you’ve created yourself. You can also share quality content from other sources to provide your audience with plenty of great stuff to consume. It helps to create Twitter lists of some of your favorite creators. This way, you can scroll through and see what they’re sharing. If something catches your eye and you think your audience would appreciate it, hit retweet and add a comment with your thoughts.

9. Review & Tweak Your Twitter Content Strategy for Efficiency

A huge part of having an effective strategy is checking in regularly to see what’s working for you and what’s not. Now, every creator has their own preference about how often they conduct a full-blown strategy audit. You may want to check in every month or at the end of every quarter for the best results. I think quarterly is a great idea because it gives you plenty of data from your analytics to dive into.

What you’ll need to do is track things like your growth, traffic to your website, etc. to see if you’re getting the results that are propelling you towards your goals. If you are, keep it up! If not, you’ll know that something needs to change.

When changes need to be made to your strategy, consider looking at your posting schedule. Are you publishing enough content on a daily basis and are you sharing it at optimal times? Are you actually tweeting about topics that are of interest to your target audience? Make necessary tweaks to boost your ROI.

10. Set Aside a Budget for Your Team, Tools, & Advertising

A budget plays a role in your Twitter content strategy because you’ll likely need to pay for things like tools, advertising, and your team. Know what you’re willing to spend on your social media management efforts so you can stay on track financially.