Should you schedule that tweet?

Using an editorial calendar for your social media efforts

You’d be remiss not to create an editorial calendar for your social media campaign. But should you schedule every tweet and post? Absolutely not. Should you organize your social media posting? Definitely!

The editorial calendar for your social media efforts should coordinate your social media campaign with your website and blogging editorial calendars. This can largely be done with scheduled tweets. But, there is still plenty of room for personal social media interaction. That comes in the form of likes, RTs, @ mentions, comments, and more. What you are looking for is a nice balance between scheduling and spontaneity.

So, what should you schedule?

• Links to new posts
• Links to old blog posts
• Quotes from old blog posts
• Quotes from famous people
• Reminders about Twitter chats
• Reminders about contests, sales, and giveaways
• Reminders about local events
• Links to information about other local businesses and organizations that are relevant to blog posts on your editorial calendar
• Tweets and Facebook mentions about topics, people, and places you will be mentioning in the blog posts you have scheduled
• Relevant content to fill in blocks of time when you will be unavailable

What shouldn’t you schedule?

• All your tweets and posts
• RTs past a day or two of posting
• Replies past a day or two of posting
• Replies to potential customers or clients that are obviously scheduled
• The same thing again and again in a short period of time–spread things out!

Will people know you are pre-scheduling? Some pros will–even if you do it well. But, everyone will know if you don’t do it well. So be careful.

To make your social media channels interesting, you need to also talk about some personal stuff and converse with others too. These types of things can’t be pre-scheduled–so you must spend some time on social media every day or every other day so your content doesn’t look forced and robotic.

Mixing scheduled tweets with spontaneous tweets is the best strategy for your business Twitter feed, Facebook page, and other social media channels. Coordinating scheduled tweets and posts with an editorial calendar is the best way to make sure your website and blog content is spread through social media channels the best way it can be.  And make sure your editorial calendars for social media and blogging work together.

But don’t schedule everything–because that is definitely not fun or interesting or social. Mix it up and have fine, because if you aren’t having fun then your customer isn’t either.