In Tuesday’s post I described how to go about setting up a steady stream of tweets to populate your Twitter account. The post covered the mechanics of the process, so now you might be wondering where to get all that content from. Here are a few ideas for how to curate outside sources to provide relevant, timely content to your followers.
In previous posts I’ve covered blog editorial calendars and programming blog content. Let’s move on to Twitter for a bit and look at how to structure an editorial calendar for Twitter.
In reality, a Twitter editorial calendar is less “editorial” and more “planning.” Given that you’ve only got 140 characters to play with (only 120 if you want to leave room for ReTweets), it’s not like you’re going to create groundbreaking editorial content for your Twitter stream. Therefore, what I use Twitter for, and what many of the people I follow seem to do, is to curate links to content I feel that my Twitter audience will be interested in receiving. This can include my own content, of course, but will also include links to others’ content. I also make use of Twitter to get questions answered, take the pulse of my followers, and to do some (very limited) self-promotion.
Here are the steps for developing a consistent, easy-to-manage Twitter stream:
In the spreadsheet I’ve included what I consider to be the most important fields that you should fill out while creating your calendar, as well as some columns for tracking your results afterward.
As you may know, we’re huge fans of editorial calendars around here. We use them for all of our client work, plus our own internal content creation efforts and social media scheduling. Here’s a look at how we approach using a social media editorial calendar.
