Creating Tweets with Microsoft Excel
Every experience writer’s block when faced with a 140-character tweet? You know you need to tweet something but your brain just doesn’t want to cooperate. But what if you had a list of ready-to-go tweets? Spend a few minutes each week creating a list of tweets in Excel and keep your stream filled with relevant tweets day after day.
Excel is a terrific tool to use thanks to its filtering, organizational, and validation features. First, create a workbook with four columns labeled Week, Type, Day, and Tweets in Excel. Use the Week field to designate a set of tweets for Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and so forth. Use the Type field to categorize the types of tweets you will be making. For example, you may want to tweet inspirational tweets, call to action tweets, and helpful tips tweets.
Next, use the Day field to indicate which day of the week the tweet is intended for. This is useful for creating a Twitter schedule with a consistent structure. For instance, you might start the week off with motivational tweets on Mondays, calls to action on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and helpful tips daily. Friday on Twitter is known as “Follow Friday,” so you may want to keep that in mind as you design your spreadsheet.
The Tweet column is where you will enter the actual tweet. Adjust the width of this column so that your tweet displays properly. Not only can you brainstorm and store a list of tweets in Excel, you can set up this column to warn you if your message is over 140-characters long. You do this with Excel’s validation tool. In Excel 2007, select the Tweets column and then click on the Data tab followed by the Data Validation icon. Choose Data Validation from the list. In the Settings tab, make the following adjustments:
- Allow – Text length
- Data – Less than or equal to
- Maximum – 140
This will generate an error if you enter more than 140 characters into a field in the Tweets column.
Once you have the basic layout created, create a basic schedule. For example, if you plan on tweeting three tweets per day, for Week 1 you will need rows for each tweet.
Once you have the basic layout and schedule, copy and paste it several times over, each time updating the Week to reflect a new week’s worth of tweets. You can later use the filter feature of Excel to view each week independently or view tweets by Type if so desired.
Now, start brainstorming tweets. You may want to work on inspirational tweets all at once and then tackle the calls to action and fun facts. There are no rules here; just get started. If you plan on adding shortened links to some of the tweets, make sure to include them in the tweet’s body or leave adjust the character limit downward. A typical Bitly link is 19 characters long. Allow 20 characters for this link as you will want a space between your punctuation mark and the Bitly link.
Once you have your tweet list generated, you can either pre-schedule the tweets by using a third party tweet scheduling tool or enter them into Twitter throughout the week. As you start using Excel to create Twitter tweets, you will soon find that you get on a roll. As ideas flow, you can enter the tweets for future use. In addition, having a master list of tweets in Excel allows you to repurpose your past tweets. After all, three months from now, you’ll have many new followers who have never seen your past tweets. And, if you have a separate Twitter account with a different set of followers, you can use your tweet list there as well. Whether you reuse your past tweets word-for-word or tweak them slightly is up to you. Make sure that they remain relevant and that their shortened links still work.
Excel is a terrific tool for creating, scheduling, and repurposing tweets. Not only will you be more organized and consistent in your tweets, sitting down once a week and brainstorming your tweets doesn’t take but a few minutes once you have the spreadsheet set up.
Related posts:
- Separate the Tweets from the Twits with the New CrowdEye Search Engine
- Guide to Using Twitter for Marketing
- How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Website
- Advertise on Twitter for Fun and Profit
- Twitter: Friendsourcing
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Thank you for sharing this great system!
This Excel/Twitter solution was excactly what I was looking for! Thank you!