What to Tweet About (and When You Can Tweet About Yourself)
A common question we get asked all the time is ‘What do I tweet about?’
If you are doing 7 tweets a day, each day, that’s 35 tweets a week you need to be thinking of and it can be quite a struggle! So here we will break it down for you.
The Meaty Content
Firstly think about your audience and what they value. For example with the audience we want to target, we know that our followers are small businesses who need help and advice making their businesses grow. So essentially that is what we Tweet about when we break it down.
ACTION: Write down what your audience would be interested in hearing about and what kind of content they would value.
Once you have that, all you need to be doing is start posting that kind of stuff, because like you have just written down, that is exactly what your audience will find interesting! It can be content you have created, or it can be content curation – where you find other content on the internet, written by other people and share it for your audience. If you can consistently share great content, your audience will love you for it and continue to listen to what you say and even recommend you.
ACTION: Laura Fitton teaches that a great way to put this into action is to create your Twitter Mission Statement. So for example ours could be:
‘At @andrewandpete we give practical advice about marketing for small business so that they can make more money.’
Give it a try yourself now:
‘At @[your@name] we Tweet [what kind of content] for [your target market].’
This now creates a test for your tweets, do they fit your mission statement? If not – don’t tweet them! You could even put your mission statement in your bio so that everyone knows what you tweet about. This will make it easier for people deciding whether or not to follow you, and give you some accountability
So you can literally write: ‘If you are a [target market] follow us for [type of content]’
Interaction Tweets
Another big chunk of our Tweets are ‘interaction tweets’ where we will go down our relevant Twitter Lists and find people to reply to or RT. This is great for giving back to your audience and building your brand awareness too, so double-y beneficial. They are also pretty easy Tweets to do too!
ACTION: Make sure it is in your Twitter Schedule to do some Interaction Tweets!
Promotional Tweets
Do we promote ourselves? Absolutely, but only if it is relevant and provides value. We tend to use the 80/20 rule as a guide, so only 20% of our tweets (if that) will be self promotional. Therefore you must be doing the other 2 types of tweets for it to be OK to self promote.
And we tend not to go for the hard sell with Self Promotion. People like to shop but they hate being sold too, especially on Twitter. We can’t stress that enough! The more you go for the hard sell, the more people will tend to ignore you and worse, unfollow you. So remember it is all about providing value, and we ‘self promote’ by promoting a free ebook, or a free course, or webinar, or networking event we run etc.
ACTION: If you are giving a lot on your Twitter, don’t forget to promote. There is a handy tool we use for promoting ourselves on Twitter here.