I’ve been doing number of workshops on how to use Twitter for business. Each time I had to go into lengthy overview of different content types and twitter content strategies.
Here is a quick overview of my thoughts on this subject.
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy includes the following stages:
- Planning (business goals, target audience, type and sources of content, frequency of distribution, etc);
- Content creation (tools, processes, methods);
- Publication (tools, processes, methods);
- Analysis/Governance (usefulness, relevance, etc..)
Let’s look at major Twitter content types.
- “Meforming” [term introduced by Guy Kawasaki] – you telling us where you are, what you eat, who are you with, etc..
- News/articles sharing – you including a link to a news story you liked;
- Event announcements;
- How to questions/complains;
- You responding, commenting on someone else’s content.
Here is a random snapshot of my twitter stream:
Out of 8 tweets, 6 contain shared links, 1 event announcement, 1 how to question. Based on my observations, about 75%-80% of all tweets contain links or belong to news/article sharing category. This is very important to understand. It means that people mostly use Twitter to share an interesting content they found elsewhere or on Twitter.
And now we come to an interesting question that I am sure will generate good discussions: does it make sense to automate some of content discovery and delivery processes on Twitter channel?
The answer from Guy Kawasaki is very loud and clear – YES, it does make sense to do this. He is using a combination of Alltop [content aggregation and discovery tool] with ObjectiveMarketer [content delivery service] to populate his twitter updates. He is also a strong proponent of repeated content delivery – each of his tweets gets repeated 4 times at a different time intervals.
My personal Twitter content strategy is different for each Twitter account I manage: some of them I run in 100% automated manner, for some I use a combination of automated and manual content delivery services. How did I decide which strategy to use? Based on the business goals for each Twitter account. [see content strategy stages above].
How about you? Do you have Twitter content strategy? Does it work for you? Does it meet your business and personal goals?
We recently met a few girls who tweet in his name. They have a script and handle the “personal touch” of the otherwise manufactured and semi automated tweets.
Now make a test and look at the tweet stream. Not a single @message to anybody – it’s just a blast into a world of autofollower who in turn don’t read it. It’s an expensive way of an email blast where each email is typed by a clerk.
I don’t have a twitter content strategy. I use Twitter to converse with relevant people, make new connections once in a while and use twitter to keep customers and business partners up to date with events and news. But I wouldn’t really call a strategy.
Does it work out? Yes. We get new clients through Twitter about 1 per day and we get about 100 new users per week through twitter. But it’s almost all up to 6 degrees of “word of mouth” 🙂
Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS