What Should I Post on Twitter? When? How Often?
Twitter is a raging river of content. In order to keep up, you’ve got to keep your content organized and fresh. Check out this calendar you can use to make sure your content shows the best of what you have to offer as well as your brand’s current initiatives in addition to best frequencies and times of day.
The good news about Twitter? You can get to post a lot of content. The bad news about Twitter? You have to post a lot of content.
This becomes considerably easier, though, with a strategy. First, let’s look at the kind of things to post.
I should start off by saying your brand can tweet anything out in realtime. This, though, becomes unsustainable, so you’ll want to be sure to have some tweets already in the can. That’s where your Content Stockpile comes in.
Your Twitter Content Stockpile
Since Twitter can handle a good amount of content - both with and without links - and since Twitter can handle a good amount of repetition, it becomes an ideal platform for creating a Content Stockpile. A Content Stockpile is a library of your content that you will schedule out or automate. I recommend using a tool like MeetEdgar to create your Content Stockpile, although you can create a Google Sheet as well. Here’s the kind of stuff to put in your Content Stockpile:
Recent Long Form Content
Twitter is unique from other social media platforms because links are more welcome on this platform than others (Facebook, for example, does not like it when you post links that take you away from Facebook). This gives you the opportunity to post your blogs, articles, videos, and podcast episodes. For every one of these recent releases, create 5 - 10 tweets and add them to your Content Stockpile. Note: this is also great for earned media, like when your brand was quoted in an article.
Evergreen Long Form Content
Quarterly, take a look at your blog and YouTube analytics and find out which pieces your audience is responding to. Any pieces that aren’t time-sensitive, can be considered evergreen. Dovetailing on the idea that links are embraced on Twitter, create 5-10 tweets based on each one of your top evergreen, long form pieces of content.
Current Initiatives
Your brand should create content around its top products or current initiatives. Create a few tweets based on these and add them to your mix.
Open-Ended Questions
To keep your audience engaged, put in a bunch of questions, polls, and prompts so that your feed doesn’t become too one-sided. Download the 150+ Polls, Prompts, and Open Ended Questions to Spark Conversations on Social Media
Curated Content
Curated content is great because it’s content that someone else creates that you can simply add your two cents to. That’s much less work for you. You can scour newspaper articles and RSS feeds to find them, but I recommend using a couple of tools together to create a really simple flow on curated content that you can add to your Content Stockpile.
How Often to Post
Twitter users don’t mind when people post often - this is the only platform that has a “storm” option that encourages users to thread their thoughts together into a series of tweets. So feel free to post multiple times a day and multiple times each week.
Download the Twitter Posting Schedule
With all of that content to create and automate it can get confusing fast, if you’re not organized. I created the Twitter Posting Schedule as a guide to know what types of content to post and when. I’ve based the times specifically on Sprout Social’s excellent resource with updated times to post to Twitter. The Twitter Posting Schedule is a Google Calendar that you can add to your own calendar, to see how often to post each type of content and when during the day. This may change with your audience, though, so be sure to take note of when your audience is responding to you and viewing your content.
Use this schedule to get you started organizing with your own Content Stockpile so that you can create a large batch of content to schedule and automate.
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