Using Twitter? Wondering whether it is doing anything for your business?
Are you tweeting at all hours throughout the day? Is their a plan, a strategy?
Why do you need a Tweet Plan?
A tweet plan will brand your twitter presence bringing consistency and saving time.
What is a Tweet Plan?
A series of scheduled tweets, carefully crafted  for the preferred audience in conjunction with real-time tweeting.
You are able to brand your Twitter presence attracting attention of the people you want to reach, providing them useful information.
Creating your Tweet Plan
1. Define your preferred audience
Whom do you want to connect on Twitter? For your Tweet Plan to be a success you should choose a few people from the different types of people who could help your business. These few would be your preferred Twitter audience. Who could these be? some suggestions: Prospects, Clients, Referral Sources, Partners, Business Network, Suppliers…
2. Decide the Number of Daily Tweets
Your Tweet Plan should only support the Tweet frequency and number of daily tweets and not be an end in itself. You need to engage with your audience by tweeting real-time sharing information  and replying to their tweets. Live tweets help you to connect with people in a way that brings them beyond Twitter and leads them along the path you want to take with them.
3. Decide How Long You Want to Run Your Tweet Plan
Once you have decided on the number of tweets to send daily, you need to decide how long you would run you Tweet Plan and schedule your tweets accordingly. This would majorly depend on the speed at which you could process the feedback received from your preferred audience and include it in you next plan.
If you ask me, I would suggest a 4 week plan, since I ‘d be eager to act upon the feedback received from my preferred audience and include it in my next plan to further strengthen the connection with my market.
4. Find and Decide the Keywords You Want to Use on Twitter
Choose the right keywords to send out a consistent signal and tell your audience who you are, how you want to connect with them and what you want to talk about. Use the keywords your preferred audience uses so that it’s easier to connect with them.
If you plan to schedule 5 tweets daily, then you choose use at least 5 keywords a day so that your audience gets information on these 5 consistently. Also remember the 140 character post limit on Twitter and try to use as many small words as possible.
5. Choose different formats for your scheduled tweets.
Let’s do some math: 10 tweets daily x 7 days x 4 weeks makes it 280 tweets. That’s a big number of tweets. To make this task easy, use different formats to write the 280 unique tweets. Using different also adds to the variety and keeps your tweets from getting boring.
Why not start with 7 different formats and use 1 for each day of the week. You could further experiment to change the sequence of these formats in the next week. Here’s what you could try:
Day 1 – Qualifying questions – Relate a problem
Day 2 – Tips – Present a  solution
Day 3 – Definitions – Focus on benefits
Day 4 – Provide useful links – to your blog
Day 5 – Alternate resources – provide links to market research
Day 6 – 3rd party resources – provide links to partner resources
Day 7 – Roundup – Include quotes around your business
6. Write your Scheduled Tweets
Since twitter does not allow duplicate tweets be sure to write unique tweets. While writing a tweet keep in mind:
> Your preferred audience
> Choose one keyword
> Choose one format
Also remember to create a combination of 1 keyword with 1 format. Use hashtags and try to limit a tweet to 120 characters so that it can easily be retweeted.
7. Choose Your Times
You surely do not want to send out a message to your audience that you are available during a certain time of the day or week. Choose time slots to send out your 7 scheduled tweets for the day. Spread out your tweets throughout the day. Ideally you would also be publishing your tweets in real-time.
8. Schedule Your Tweets
Last, its time to schedule your tweets. Now you need to decide on tools to schedule your tweets. Out of the many tools available you could use these 2: Hootsuite and SocialOomph
Contact me if you want further information and/or help creating a Tweet Plan.