The word “Twitter” evokes a promise of divulged trade or personal secrets, even though there's nothing secret about it. Your tweets are as public a forum as it gets, which is why some media companies are hesitating to get involved. How much of a commitment is required?
Whether it’s a specific campaign or an ongoing relationship-building exercise, a publisher’s Twitter activities can quickly become a time-sink for the poor staffers (usually editors or marketers) who are charged with producing a steady stream of Tweets. To lessen the impact a Twitter commitment has on an editorial or marketing staff, everyone needs to pitch in.
Ownership, teamwork
A coordinated effort can help ensure regular contributions. To show how you can keep track of your team’s Twitter activity – who’s posting, what they’re posting and when they’re posting it – I’ve created a sample one-week Twitter editorial schedule for a fictional Caribbean travel magazine, “Caribbean Adventures.” The schedule, as the fictional team prepares to cover a trade show, illustrates how an editorial group can work together to guarantee a base amount of content with minimal time invested.
The editorial staff of five includes one editor, “Janice”, who acts as a custodian of the account and has more tweeting responsibility than the rest of the staff. Janice is well-versed in the Twitter platform and can quickly write engaging content in 140 characters or less. The goal for this editorial team is to have four fresh industry-related tweets per day and for most of the editors to only invest about one hour per week of tweeting time.
As such, the schedule has been broken up so that Janice only needs to participate on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, while the other four editors are each responsible for one tweet or re-tweet (forwarding someone else’s post to your publication’s followers) on both Mondays and Tuesdays. That's two tweets per week for the majority of the editorial staff. On the remaining days, Janice is responsible for four tweets—two unique tweets and two re-tweets.
While unique content is important, re-tweeting (indicated in a post by "RT") shares relevant community information and shaves off editorial time invested in the project. By re-tweeting information from the trade show association and industry thought leaders, the editors draw the attention to their brand of both these entities and their followers. Another tactic, called “hashtagging,” also serves this purpose by adding keywords to a feed. Re-tweeting also gets tech-shy editors used to communicating in short burst text messages.
How the schedule works
In the “Tweet Subject” column, editors can easily copy and paste their tweet (or re-tweet) into the schedule, so that all can see what was added to the account. (This is also a good way for the editors to monitor how many unique tweets versus re-tweets they are posting.)
For example, on Monday, “Maya” let her colleagues and audience know that she posted the news to the publication's website (including a Bit.ly-shortened URL to “CaribbeanAdventures.com”), “Tina” reminded the network that Caribbean Adventures would be at the Coconut Expo, “Clyde” re-tweeted something industry-related that he found interesting and smart (in the “Retweet Subject” column), and “Zak” shared some news. That's plenty of content for one day.
Fear of crowds
The next few columns in the calendar address any potential fear of brand damage that users might inflict. Publishers need to get comfortable with the openness of a Twitter network. Anyone can follow anyone. Users can be blocked, if necessary, but the point is to grow a network more vast than one that can be created in real space—so policing followers is secondary to policing posts. Editors must not only add content, but monitor posts and direct messages from users in the network, which means deleting inappropriate or unrelated comments and responding to relevant messages. Remember, this is real-time interaction.
Notice that each editor is in weekly rotation to act as gatekeeper for the account. Janice acts as gatekeeper Wednesdays through Fridays and the remaining editors each watch the account on Mondays and Tuesdays, about twice per month (click here for the four-week version of the schedule). Checking comments every day around 4 pm should be sufficient (Twitter is not an especially malicious platform).
Finally, in the “Details” column, editors share to whom they responded and when and why they deleted a user comment. By setting up a formal policing schedule for UGC, publishers can minimize their social media fear of brand damage.
Unspontaneous combustion
It may seem against the spontaneous nature of tweeting to schedule out a calendar. The thing to remember is that the schedule ensures a base amount of content on the account every day. Editors should be urged to post their industry-related thoughts as prolifically as possible.
Tweeting is at its best in real-life situations like engaging conference sessions and man-on-the-street events. However, when things are slow, sticking to a schedule is an effective way to promote newsletters and breaking news, and to send traffic to your website.
