To be effective on Twitter you need to setup a good workflow and learn how to schedule your Tweets to get the best impact with your audience. Scheduling your Tweets will save you time and help you be more productive with your social media. It is all too easy on social media to get distracted, lose valuable time and not achieve your objectives.
If you use these process for your Tweets then it will help you stay focused and get more targeted with your social media.
Research your sources
For each topic in your market that you want to write about you should know who the original thinkers are and the thought leaders. Original thinkers are often academics or people in research/think tank environments.
Thought leaders are people, (sometimes that are also original thinkers). who tend to be on the ball with market trends and use original thinkers. Often they write books and are heavy weight influencers in a market sector. Other sources may be magazines (content curators) - you will know the right mix for your sector. One thing to bear in mind is how much time you want to spend scanning and reading these sources - too much and you will be overloaded.
By researching these people and getting to know the key topics, trends and building a list of these you start to build a great source of content for your tweets.
How To Schedule Your Tweets
Organise Your Feeds
Most of the sources you will find and use will have an RSS feed. An RSS feed provides a neat way for you to get updates when new blogs or articles are post on a blog, without having to go back to the blog to read the article. You can use the RSS feed to organise the content feeds from these sources.
I used to use Google Reader but since Google announced it was terminating this I have moved to Feedly. In Feedly you can create topic folders and then add in your feeds. The great part is that Feedly then makes it easy to share content into Buffer. But before we do that we need to find out what is the best time to Tweet for your following/audience.
Feedly has an app for Apple and for Android.
You may not know this
You can use RSS feeds from Pinterest - here is how:
View a USER RSS feed simply by going to the user's Pinterest URL, and adding /feed.rss to the end of the end of the url.
Like this example: (my username is 'tribalcafeuk')
http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/feed.rss
View a specific BOARD feed by going to the board URL, replace the final / with .rss
Like this example: (one of my board name is 'social media infographics' at url = http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/social-media-infographics/)
http://pinterest.com/tribalcafeuk/social-media-infographics/rss
How cool is that?
There are a few different tools you can use to find out about what time is the best to schedule your Tweets. Each one may give you different results based on the algorithm that they use. The best way to work is to pick one and then use it and by tracking your results you will soon be able to understand how accurate they are as weel as the best time for your audience.
Dan Zarella research shows that the best time is later in the day, presumably when people have left work (mentally if not in reality) and in the eraly evening. However everybody is different with their audience.
Some tools to try to find out the best time to Tweet
Make a not of key times and key days.
Customise Buffer Timings
If you sign into Buffer and under schedule tab you will see the default timings for your account. You can customise these timings for the total week on the free plan and by day using the paid plan.
Using the data from Step 3 set the timings in Buffer.
Schedule Your Tweets From Feedly
You will notice that in Feedly if you click on a post item you get a menu of share options below. Now as you read the posts and choose the ones that you want to share you can easily click on the Buffer button and schedule these via Buffer.
Another tip is to link your url shortener to Bitly - you can then check on which content got the most clicks which is very useful
The only thing to do now is to make sure you mix it up by adding in your own personality and Tweets between these scheduled ones. Of course the thank you and mentions also fit inbetween.
Schedule Your Tweets From Feedly
Now closing the loop always mention is to understand what really is the best time for you to tweet and to assess what content is giving you the best results e.g. what sources. This is where you need to review Bitly and your Buffer Analytics.
This process achieves two goals:
- it is an efficient workflow and so will save you time
- it will help you deliver good quality content at the best time to your audience and therefore boost your impact
Therese are just a few tips and ways on how to schedule Tweets - there are a host of other ways to do this e.g. within Hootsuite.
What tools do you use to save time on social media?