Last week I talked about maximizing the elements you have control of on Twitter. By combining the elements of copy formulas, scheduling, hashtags and @s, you can grow an entire ecosystem around each article you promote.
Moving forward, let’s discuss what this ecosystem looks like and how you can repurpose one article into infinite promotional opportunities.
Let’s use Real Simple’s 7 Ways to Use Leftover Buns article as an example. If today was Jan. 1 and my target audience was only the United States, this is how I’d schedule this post for maximum longevity.
January 1st, 9am, the headline tweet:
January 1st, 11am, the shout-out:
January 1st, 2pm, the subhead:
January 1st, 5pm, the content pull:
January 1st, 8pm, the seo effort:
January 1st, 11pm, the creative attempt:
[text_ad]
After day one, above, we like to increase the longevity of our favorite articles to drive traffic throughout the year. So we reuse these tweets five or more more times during the year, posting them two months apart and choosing the formulas that worked best. I like to save the SEO tweet for last to give it another SEO boost after some time has passed.
9am, March 1, the basic tweet:
11am, May 1, the shout-out:
2pm, July 1, the subhead:
5pm, September 1, the content pull:
8pm, November 1, the seo effort:
On January 2nd, there would be a new post to promote, so we’d promote it on the 2nd of all these months and keep working through the month. You might also switch up the times, adding five or ten minutes to their scheduled times so that you avoid overlap from occurring.
This method for recycled promotion has been working well for us and keeps bringing in a steady stream of traffic by keeping our feed populated. It lets you focus on promoting one article a day, but drive traffic for an unlimited amount of time. Every day you move forward, you’re adding more scheduled post to each day in the month, leaving you with more time to write better headlines and less time thinking about old articles.
Oops!! That was an error, there should definitely be a link in that tweet! 🙂
Great formula! Is there a reason why you wiuld not add your URL on the last SEO tweet? Thx!
Great question, Jason. This is a prime example for a publisher who’s already tweeting 20+ times a day. Most of your followers aren’t watching their feed all day long, so they’ll only catch one or two of these tweets. Posting them all in one day while tracking those links can also help to determine when the best time of day is best to post in the future.
If you tweet much less and think the one-day strategy is too much, rearrange it to use one formula each day for six days (or for as many days as you want to write new formulas). 🙂
Wow I’m going to start using this formula right away. Do you think six times in one day is too much though?