How I Schedule Tweets Using Buffer:

#1 | CREATE CATEGORIES FOR YOUR TWEETS

When I revamped my social media strategy, I created some buckets or categories that served as the different topics for my tweets. I did this, because now I always have a starting point when it comes to writing tweets and I’m never starting from a blank slate (we all know how difficult that is). The categories I use are:

• My blog posts/videos
• Self-promotion
• Other people’s articles
• Tips
• Questions
• Inspiration

You can then create a table in Google Docs, mix these around and you’ve got the foundation for your Twitter schedule.

#2 | SORT OUT YOUR POSTING SCHEDULE

You could just guess when your audience is going to be most active online or you could use a free tool that syncs with your Buffer account and analyses your Twitter followers to see when they’re most active on the platform – Followerwonk.

It’s completely you how many tweets you schedule per day but the more you schedule, the more chance you have of promoting yourself. Update this schedule using the Followerwonk tool every single week to stay relevant and on top of your followers’ habits.

#3 | UTILISE YOUR COPY EFFECTIVELY

You could schedule your blog posts to Buffer and just use your headline, but you won’t be utilising your copy effectively that way. I like to tell people exactly why they should read the post and what’s in it for them, because that’s a way to get much better results. You want to encourage further action. Here are some pointers:

• Your blog posts/other people’s articles – ask a question, use a verb at the beginning of the tweet, place your link either in the middle of the tweet or at the end.
• Self-promotion – this can mean anything from asking people to sign up to a webinar, promoting your services or getting people to follow you on other social platforms.
• Tips – use ones that are related to your industry and include a hashtag at the start e.g. #ProductivityTip.
• Question – advice, personal, get to know your audience more…anything goes!
• Inspiration – quotes and personal thoughts work really here. Include a quote graphic and your tweet will get even more reach.

A few things to note about scheduling tweets in Buffer:

• You need to schedule a lot of tweets to get noticed. The average lifetime span of a tweet is 18 minutes, which means you’re going to need to share your latest blog post more than once if you want to get as many views on it as possible. You also want to make sure that you’re using different messaging – just use the same content and people will get bored. You have to remember there’s always a chance of you reaching a new audience.
   
• Live interaction helps. People like to connect with people. Especially on social media. So make sure that while you’re scheduling tweets, you’re also dedicating a little chunk of time each day to posting some live, in-the-moment tweets and also interacting too. Scheduling tweets means you’re adding value to your feed 24/7 but it’s not going to work if you’re not interacting with people. It’s all about making human connections.
   
• Re-buffer content. If you are short on time or you’ve noticed that certain tweets are performing really well (check out Buffer’s analytics), you can just go into your Buffer account and re-buffer that content so it goes back to your main feed and gets pushed out again. While I wouldn’t recommend doing this with every single tweet you post, it’s great for when you’re short on time or you’re promoting something and you’ve noticed certain tweets have got a lot of traction. Again, it’s about utilising the platform to its advantage.

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