Everyone needs a Tweetplan

Content planning for Twitter

This page is worth a lot of study, get this bit down pat and this could be a big time saver. It could also be very good for business and is full of time saving ideas, especially useful – and deadly effective if you have more tha one account to manage.

But first, have you mastered The art of the Tweet yet?

Lets start by tweeting a few cool things about you. Top tips, quotes, jokes, questions – in fact all the things you might put on an “about you” page. So as an exercise, dust off your cv, and write a introduction to you, do include the family things and the key events, holidays and jobs, big WOW moments as you wish! Add locations, but not specific addresses, telephone numbers or anything about your finances! You are not going to twitter your “About you”, you could though, eventually!

The idea is to tease out the events, the people, the places, the ideas that you have found interesting. When you have found them, you can start by asking open questions as Twitter asks – what are you doing? Thinking about my Aunt getting drunk on a Christmas day could be a tweet. But an open question could be produce better results -

1. can you share an embarrassing moment on a previous Christmas?
2. can you share a happy birthday party moment?
3. can you share a funny moment on a previous Easter?
4. can you share a sunny holiday moment?

Or just go and share one of your own. If it is funny it will probably be forwarded…

I just got inspired writing this, so here are some tweets I wrote:

1. @weboptimiser This years Crisis Run is over and I hear John was first! or was he last? Who can confirm? Were you there? Will you be next year?
2. @weboptimiser Since we started writing a Social Media guide on How to tweet – We turned all our auto tweets off! http://www.howtotweet.co.uk join us!

Maybe we can add irony to the list of things you can tweet about… dry humour?

If you don’t have a website already, you could build one just about you – your online bio – on blogger.com, or create a myspace page. Whatever solution you choose, link to it from your Twitter profile and so when people check you out, they find out more about you.

The key is to make your tweets follow -worthy and preferably re- tweetable.

Twitter Etiquette

When you find that people mention you – and you will find that they do – quite often by sending you a DM (Direct Message that may well be auto generated from their account) you can reply to them and openly thank them for their kind message. You can personalise it and cherry pick, simply by looking at their profile and either connecting very closely or simply comment on their profile – you will be surprised at how the odd conversation can begin and where it can take you. Sometimes instantly.

This is why lots of people talk about treating Twitter as a party, there are a lot of folk out there and you don’t know who you might meet or what they are interested in, but eventually, when you start talking to people at a party, conversation may turn to what they do and then you could find yourself talking about business.

Search for content when you need it

Simply search for your key words in google, but when you search you need to use a power user tool to make sure that what you find is more useful. So instead of searching for ‘social media’ search for ‘allintitle:social media’. You will need a Google account and from your main menu or from google, search for Google Alerts and login. From there enter your search term (with ‘allintitle:’) and create a feed.

You can also use Alltop.com or virtually any blog as nearly all provide RSS feeds that you can use.

Other Alert systems

You can also open an account with Twilert.com, backtype.com or Tweetbeep. They will search Twitter for you. They keep you informed by email and provide another source of content for your tweets.

You could run an alert for your industry, your company, your university, what ever you want to keep tabs on and you can run alerts for a range of subjects. There are limits, you can work with them, pay the money or open more free accounts!

Automated content creation

You need to set up a series of alerts. To automate them, then you must look to get your alert delivered to you by RSS, as a feed. Google alerts will allow you to do this, no problem.

You will need to copy each of your feed addresses, the same address that you would use to view a feed into an account that you need to set up at http://twitterfeed.com. You set up each feed and feed it to each of your twitter accounts.

That’s it for now

We hope you have found this edition interesting, the next part will be in your in-box shortly, thanks for reading. The best thing you can do now is to take action – go ahead – and follow us… @weboptimiser

Now, if you enjoyed that – and all our ducks were perfectly lined up – meaning you had truly checked out all the ideas described here were in play, then it would be time to release this link to the next lesson (it will not be released if you don’t implement!) on Business Applications