In this post I’ll explain my daily Twitter schedule and the workflow that I use to gather and share content.
At the start of the week, I was fortunate to attend a webinar hosted by Tim Hughes, one of the founders of DLA Ignite. Tim is one of social media’s genuine business celebrities, a blue-tick Twitter maven who’s passionate about social selling and how this can accelerate the digital transformation of your business where other methods have failed.
If you want to learn the skills and habits for social media and marketing success, I’d strongly recommend you get hold of a copy of Smarketing, How to Achieve Competitive Advantage Through Blended Sales and Marketing, written by Tim and his Digital Leadership Associates co-founder Adam Gray. As I’ve written before, Tim and Adam are ‘high-performance’ social media experts, who communicate complex ideas in simple language so that anyone can apply social selling methods in their business.
Back to the Monday webinar. Tim talked us through the good habits that you need to succeed on Twitter: Be curious, share great content, use hashtags wisely, post a good balance of original content and retweets every day. Spoiler alert, you probably need to post at least 12 times a day to get traction with your community on Twitter.
A dozen or more posts a day might sound daunting, so it got me thinking about my own Twitter workflow. First things first. I love social, but it’s not my core daily activity. That still belongs to business copywriting and content strategy. More often than not, I’m fitting in Twitter around 1,000 words on machine learning for music streaming, or the deployment of “platform as a service” in local government.
Here’s my schedule:
8.00am-8.30am: Twitter timeline
Check and respond to overnight notifications
Share and respond to topical posts. In my case anything to do with content marketing, AI and life in Berlin
8.30am-9.00am: Gather content
Read and save new articles from: Flipboard, Medium (subscription) and Google alerts (See the workflow below).
12.30am-1.00pm: Schedule content (1)
Schedule tweets using Buffer. Include an original statement or headline for context. Tag source publication and author where possible. Include relevant hashtags, up to four.
5.15pm-5.45pm Schedule content (2)
A second opportunity to make sure that your buffer schedule is full. I normally post about 1-2 days ahead.
5.45pm-6pm Respond
Check and respond to notifications from the day.
I admit, it adds up. More than two hours if you follow my activity. The good news is that you can match some of the more routine stuff with a coffee break or a break from more intensive work. If you do a lot of writing, like me, Twitter often comes as a bit of light relief.
Working to a workflow
In addition to my schedule, here’s a snapshot of the workflow I use for gathering content and scheduling posts. A couple of things to bear in mind: Generally, I use Buffer to schedule posts two-three days ahead. I share articles via Hootsuite (another great scheduling tool) on a more spontaneous basis. This enables me to plan ahead, while sharing more up-to-the-minute stories when I have a spare moment.
Twitter content and schedule workflow
You can, of course, save anything to Pocket, not just from Flipboard or a news aggregator such as Feedly. Once you’ve set up a Pocket account, use the share icon on your smartphone to save your favourite articles. You can also download chrome extensions for Buffer and Pocket that serve a similar function on your laptop browser.
Finally, you can also schedule posts from Buffer to LinkedIn, LinkedIn pages, Facebook and Instagram if you post frequently to these channels.
As I mentioned before, you should also follow Tim Hughes and Adam Gray on Twitter to see how it’s really done. And if you want to learn how to be the best at social selling, get in touch with them, or via their business, DLA Ignite.
