So What's the Tweet?

Well, be careful what you wish for. We've launched our Twitter page and now we have to feed the beast. So comes the next step in your company's Twitter page. You've taken the time to answer the five simple questions that will help you strategize your Twitter efforts. You've launched your page. Now, what to Tweet?

Well, this is a little more difficult to discern. It can really vary by industry and it is also dependent on what your answer to question number one was (see the previous post). In our case we are trying to reach our customers. So the goal is to offer up tweets that are relevant to our customers.

While this sounds simple and straight forward, it isn't as easy as that. It is important that you get a few people thinking about what you want to tweet about. Don't put all the pressure on yourself to come up with relevant tweets. Try to get a team of people thinking about it.

When you do decide what you are going to tweet, try to make it a call to action or offer your audience something more from you tweet. Send them to your website with a link. Send them to a partner website or provide them with a physical location you recommend they visit. Invite them to do something.

You want your audience to come to expect that they were learn from your tweets or that there is something in it for them. This will help you to build the number of followers you have and will also improve your chances of having your information "retweeted" or forwarded to your follower's followers.

It is a good idea to brainstorm a series of tweets and then decide how often you want to tweet at a minimum. You can always tweet more, but you need to make sure you have set number of tweets you will do each day or each week. You must tweet at the very least once a week, but try to tweet once a day. Again you can increase the number of tweets if you find you have more to say.

When you tweet remember that Twitter is a short lived medium. You can give your followers a heads up about a coming event, but unless the event is happening with the next 24 hours, you will probably need to tweet about it again. This is a great way to build up anticipation about an event though, so don't discount it all together.

So, here's the bottom line about what to tweet:

1. Make sure you have your target audience in mind as you think of your tweets.
2. Have a team of people who can help you come up with tweet subjects (or at least one other person).
3. Have a list of tweet subjects ready to go at all times.
4. Have a call to action or an additional option to allow your followers to get more from your tweet (i.e. a link to your site or another site, or invite your followers to physically do something)
5. Determine how often you are going to tweet, set a minimum, you can always tweet more. Consistency is important.
6. Keep the format of this medium in mind when you're tweeting. Information on Twitter is short lived so if you're talking about a future event it will need to be tweeted repeatedly.

If you follow the guide above you should be able to keep your Twitter page up. Consistency and the relevance of your tweets build quality followers and quality is more important than quantity.