Twitter is the most popular micro-blog platform, and the fifth most-popular social media network. It is a low-cost, quick, and easy way to reach your audience. 

And unlike Facebook, Instagram, and so on, it’s an open platform, available to all, so it’s a great way to become known outside your regular customer base.

In addition, surveys have shown that over 90 percent of Twitter users who follow business accounts plan to buy from those businesses.

So if you’ve overlooked Twitter as a possible marketing tool up to now, you might want to give it a try.

To get the most out of your tweets, however, and the most engagement from your followers, you need to maintain a constant presence on Twitter. That means you can’t just tweet when you think about it, or whenever you get a chance in your busy day.

That’s where scheduling comes in. Scheduling your tweets can make all the difference in your reach and engagement on Twitter, especially if you’re active on several social media platforms. And doing so can free up your time so you can focus on other aspects of running your business.

Start with a strategy

If you use Twitter for personal tweets, you can just fire one off anytime you get the urge. But if you’re using Twitter for business, you’ll need to have a marketing strategy to get the best return on your time investment.

The first step, before you even begin to develop any type of strategy, is to spy on your competition. Check out what they’re tweeting about, which of their tweets receives the best response from their followers, and how you might apply that to your own product or service.

Or, see if you think they’re doing something wrong that you could do better.

The next phase for any successful marketing strategy is to have a measurable goal or goals. Otherwise, you can’t judge whether what you’re doing is working.

Do you want to:

  • Gain new followers? If so, how many?
  • Increase traffic to your website? By how much?
  • Get more retweets? How many more would mean you’re meeting your goal?

Set up a schedule

Once you have a solid marketing strategy in place, you can start scheduling your tweets.

Unlike with other social media, Twitter users expect to see more frequent posts from those they follow. But you need to be careful not to go overboard and end up annoying followers.

Most experts suggest you tweet between 10-15 times a day. That could be a bit much, however. Twitter analytics can show you how your audience is responding to your tweets, so use that knowledge to experiment with frequency.

How often you tweet largely depends on what type of content you’re sharing. If your posts contain engaging content, you can feel confident in tweeting more often. By that we mean posts that have some meaning to your specific audience, rather than just random things you personally find interesting.

Consider using tools

Twitter gives you the ability to schedule your tweets through your Twitter account on the Ads section of the Twitter Business dashboard.

Or use Twitter’s free TweetDeck tool if you don’t have a Twitter Ads account.

You could also turn to one of the many commercial scheduling tools that are available.

These include:

Their pricing is all about the same, starting from free limited service to basic service at $15 a month and up.

A few precautions

All the scheduling tools allow you to go in and edit tweets you haven’t sent in case circumstances change, so you don’t have to worry that you might be scheduling too far in advance.

Just because you’ve set up automatic scheduling doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep an eye on your Twitter feed, though, because you’ll want to respond in a timely fashion—at least the same day, if not sooner—when people reply to your tweets. And if people share your posts, be sure to like them.

One final word: Keep an eye on the news. If some significant event occurs that has captured the nation’s attention, rethink sending out pre-scheduled business tweets at this time. Especially if it’s a tragedy or crisis, promotional tweets can seem tone deaf, so remember to pause your tweets until you can gauge whether they’re appropriate under the circumstances.

We can help you get the most out of your Twitter reach and engagement (or any other social media platform!).

For example, we can show you the right way to use hashtags, the best way to use graphics, how to get the most from Twitter Polls, and how to cross-promote across other platforms.

So contact our social media marketing experts today to learn how to revamp your Twitter reach and engagement.