In Nov 2022, KP (the "Build In Public" Guy on Twitter) was asked how to go from 0 to 3000 without all the bullshit. His answer was simple: 10 tweets a day, 2 threads a week, and interacting with larger accounts regularly. To the same tune, David Dill (from the Twitter Affiliate Masterclass) recommends 5 tweets a day, a Twitter thread every 2-3 days, and commenting on larger accounts 20+ times a day. One thing is for sure, if you intend to grow, a tweet day or two isn't going to cut it, no matter how good your Twitter game is. Finding social media calendar ideas for Twitter is about immersing yourself in your industry's online scene and becoming a steward of useful and actionable information in your space. The goal is to set up systems that make it easy for interesting information to show up on your radar.
In this post we'll look at what "good" content even means and we'll run through a 15-point checklist for finding content your audience will love.
The problem with creating original content
Original content takes a painfully long time to produce. If we're to follow KP and David's guidelines, then we're looking at 150 to 300 tweets a month. That is a lot of original content.
Creating clear, useful content is a slow process. Meanwhile, the average half-life of a tweet is only 24 minutes. Relying on original content on a fast-paced platform like Twitter will make it difficult to get anything else done. If you try and rush things, you'll likely end up spamming people's feeds with lots of light, filler content. Who wants to be that person? The way to combat this problem is to curate relevant content that other people have created and use it in combination with your own original content.
The value of curating content
The whole point of creating content for social media is to be useful to your audience and help people. Whether this value comes from original content or from curating useful resources that other people have put together is irrelevant.
Curating information is arguably a more effective approach since it allows you to sidestep the issues of why people should care about what you have to say. People are disinclined to pay attention to someone without much credibility. Curating useful things other people have said, allows you to build a focused audience and say useful, interesting stuff while you're still building authority in a domain.
How to find good content
"Good" content is relative to who is reading it and the kind of change they want to make. On some level, your audience is trying to accomplish something they value. Content is only "good" in so far as it helps them get closer to where they're trying to go.
The more actionable information is, the more useful becomes. The idea is to prioritize information people can do something with once they're done reading it. It's not that everything you share has to be actionable. Unusual and unexpected stuff is great, so long as you can connect the dots back to how it is relevant to your audience's goals.
With that said, finding stuff your audience will love is down to immersing yourself in your professional scene and setting up systems so that "good" things find you.
I'm going to assume you've already Googled the main keywords in your industry and are familiar with the top 10 or 20 articles in your space. Google search and Wikipedia are good places to start, but a neat trick that I learned from Josh Spector is that Google News is much more rewarding for this kind of work. Setting up google alerts around your key terms and using them to search Google News every few weeks gives you much more up-to-date information about interesting things happening in your space.
People also tend to forget that search exists on video and audio as well. You want to be familiar with the top 10-20 youtube videos in your space and the top 10 podcast episodes around your topic.
The next step is to find interesting people. This includes relevant newsletters, social media profiles, competitors, journalists, and podcasts. A good way to start is to just search for the top 10 journalists, podcasts or newsletters, etc, in your field. Then sign up for newsletters, and podcasts, and follow the people you find.
If you're struggling to find interesting people to follow. A neat trick is to go to the likes tab of accounts you enjoy and find the people they like. Interesting people tend to group together, so when you find one, you want to stretch it as far as you can.
The last step is to find a few good communities to join. These could be on slack, discord, Facebook groups, paid communities, or it could just be a good subreddit. The Hive Index is a great resource for finding communities. Active communities are incredibly fertile spaces for harvesting relevant questions and problems that concern your audience. One other great way to collect these kinds of questions is to attend workshops and seminars and pay close attention to the FAQ at the end of the sessions. These are all useful questions that you can bring up on Twitter and address with your curated content calendar.
A checklist for finding great content every few weeks
Finding social media calendar ideas for Twitter can feel like a daunting task. To help with this, we've compiled a checklist that you can run through every few weeks that will help you find useful content to share.
Have you watched the top 10 Youtube videos for the main keywords in your space?
Search ListenNotes with your main keywords and listen to the top 10 podcast episodes around your topic. Have you Googled the main keywords in your industry and worked your way down to page 10? There are often gems buried deep in search results that just don't rank well.
Read the Wikipedia page on your topic and follow up on each of the links at the end.
Search Google News for the main keywords in your industry.
Set up alerts around your key terms. Subscribed to 5 relevant newsletters or publications in your industry (just search for a top 5 newsletters in x industry).
Subscribe to the best 3 podcasts in your space.
Follow the 10 most interesting people on social media around your topic ( sometimes the easiest way to find these people is to scan the list of guests in your podcasts).
Follow the top 3 hashtags people actually use in your space.
Follow your top 5 competitors (use Twitter lists for this).
Follow the top 5 journalists that write about your topic (just pay attention to the authors of all the content you have so far).
Join the most relevant subreddits in your space.
Have you found 2 active communities to be a part of? (Use the hive index) Have you signed up for the 2-3 seminars, events, meetups, or workshops around your topic.
How to schedule your tweets and automate your content calendar
Once you have found about 75 pieces of content to post, you can schedule all your tweets for the next two weeks. This way, you can see what resonates with your audience before you repeat the whole process.
At Chirr App, we've built a content calendar module that makes it really easy to queue all your content up in one go.
Start by composing your tweet or thread in the editor. We also have a chrome extension that makes it really easy to grab snippets from articles online. Then use one of our 4 queuing options to build up your content calendar.
Following KP and David's advice, I'd recommend posting no less than 5 times a day. You can use the schedule setting tab to set up the same times every day, or you could have different posting times each day (for example, we don't like to post on weekends because we're not around to respond to any comments right away). We've also added a link with some thoughts on how to find the best times to tweet at the end of the article.
Chirr App also has an evergreen content pool that lets you recycle popular posts every 90 days. Once you've repeated this process for a few months and you have a library of 500 or so tweets to share, then you can just cycle through them every three months. This way, you have the bulk of your Twitter content on autopilot, and you can step in from time to time and replace the least performing or outdated content with new and interesting stuff that you find along the way.
Cycling through your content every three months means you will only repeat any one piece of content 4 times a year. At Chirr App, we feel that a 3-month interval is long enough that you don't have to retweet your own posts and bludgeon people with the same content over and over, but it also means you don't have to spend all of your waking time curating new content. Using this process to set up a strong foundation of about 3 months of good content and then cycling through it frees you up to spend more time interacting with people on Twitter and leaning into the more social aspects of the platform.
Conclusion
One parting tip is to try and avoid posting links to articles or podcast episodes. Social media platforms don't promote posts with links that take people off of the platform in the same way that they promote content that keeps people on the platform. More importantly, nobody wants to have to go and read your article recommendation to find out why it was interesting. The idea is to highlight the snippet or point that you found interesting or useful and turn that into a tweet or thread. Also, know that one good piece of content can result in lots of tweets. Rather than dropping a link to a podcast episode you enjoyed, you can extract and summarise the 12 bits in the conversation that you thought were interesting and share them and standalone tweets.
One of the best ways to find social media calendar ideas for Twitter is to immerse yourself in your industry's online scene and become a steward of useful and actionable information. By doing this, you can set up systems that make it easy for interesting information to show up on your radar. This will help you stay up-to-date with what's going on in your industry, and ensure that you're always sharing fresh and relevant content with your followers.
Chirr App is an all-in-one Twitter author app that helps you write threads and tweets, engage with your audience, and access actionable analytics so you could write amazing content consistently.
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