How to generate Twitter variations quickly

Struggling to keep up with posting tweets every few hours on Twitter? Struggling to repurpose content and obey the Twitter variations rule?

Want to find a quick, reliable way to help?

Let us show you how to do that quickly and easily.

Understanding the Twitter Variations and Repetition Policy

To be able to understand why and when variations of content would become useful to you as a marketer, we first need to understand Twitter’s Tweet repetition and variations rule. Introduced back in early 2018, the rule was a way for the platform to limit the surge in bot accounts posting spam or election propaganda. The aim was to keep the platform feeling safe for its users going forward.

The concept of the rule is simple. It covers the disallowance of several content tactics that previously even legitimate marketers employed.

These are;

• Not simultaneously posting identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts.
• Not simultaneously performing actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts.

Why would marketers have used Twitter variations?

As a marketer it is your job to create social media content that talks about your products and services in a number of ways. Now depending on which platform you post that content to, that content has a shelf life. On Twitter that is around 18 minutes, according to Moz, after which time a tweet’s impact is lost with the churn of regular, fresh content overlaying it. That makes marketing on Twitter particularly hard work if you want something to be seen and reacted to on a single platform.

This is where variations of an original tweet come into play.

As a Marketer, you can create a strong piece of content and have the ability to post tweaks in your wording, or imagery to make it look and feel fresh again - meaning you have more opportunities to post it to your account and avoid Twitter jail.

- SARAH MILLIS (MY INDIE LIFE BLOG)

The age old problem of creating Twitter variations specifically

Good content takes time to build and as a content creator you understand this more than most - the way you craft your content has a specific impact on how it plays out with your audience. Layer on top of this the variations rule for Twitter and it can feel like creating daily content for your account is never-ending.

Let us imagine for a moment that you work for a company that has several Twitter accounts, maybe individual staff accounts as well as customer service and update accounts. Now for some of these accounts, there will be significantly different content going out, but for others, there may be a desire to mention the same topic to the multiple account followers. An example of this could be a Black Friday sale you are planning to host. As a marketer, it would be your job to create the initial content, and now variations of it, to filter in between native content to keep each account feeling fresh.

This is where you need a plan on how to achieve this scale of tweets at a quicker pace.

How to generate Twitter variations quickly

Here at PostMaker we have created a tool to help you generate Twitter variations quickly and easily using variables in your content.

Here’s an example of how our system works. Let us say you are a women’s clothing brand and you wish to create Twitter variations from the following tweet to help you promote your Black Friday sale.

“JOIN US for our #blackfridaysale 👉 URL LINK We have lots of hugely discounted [product] for you to choose from 😊”

You know that you have a lot of different stock items going into your sale. Grabbing a list from your sales team you understand this to comprise at least ten product categories - sweaters, dresses, skirts, trousers, tops, shirts, shoes, boots, etc, etc.

You could copy and paste the tweet reworking the product category name to create your 10 variations and although this does the job, it isn’t really refreshing the content enough and you run the risk of boring your audience, instead of eliciting that all-important click-through.

What we offer you, as a content creator, is a way to build out your tweet structure in a way that gives you much bigger numbers of Twitter variations as a result and freshening your content in the process.

Here’s that same tweet again:

“JOIN US for our #blackfridaysale 👉 URL LINK We have lots of hugely discounted [product] for you to choose from 😊”

Using PostMaker you could create variables for the following parts of your tweet: [JOIN US for - which is your call to action starter], [#blackfridaysale - your hashtag], [hugely discounted - your offer], [product - one of you 10 categories].

If we take the first variable [JOIN US for] you could also say in the same space: [TOMORROW is], or [TODAY is]. These variations give you 3 versions of the same tweet.

“JOIN US for our #blackfridaysale 👉 URL LINK We have lots of hugely discounted [product] for you to choose from 😊”

“TOMORROW is our #blackfridaysale 👉 URL LINK We have lots of hugely discounted [product] for you to choose from 😊”

“TODAY is our #blackfridaysale 👉 URL LINK We have lots of hugely discounted [product] for you to choose from 😊”

Add to that the 10 variations in product categories and you have 30 variations of tweets you are able to post, across one, or several of your accounts.

All you need to do is decide your variables beforehand, build them out in our software, which takes seconds, and then create your content variations from it. Again in seconds.

We also allow for a .CSV file export, meaning you can upload this to your social media scheduler of choice and have the content ready to add images to in minutes!

What is even better is that you have these variables sitting in your library for future use, meaning future content can take less time to put together.

Conclusion - saving yourself time creating Twitter variations

Twitter variations are an important part of marketing when it comes to eliciting engagement across your content, specifically for key calls to action in your monthly marketing plan. When you create them, it is crucial that you have a system to help you scale production quickly and easily. PostMaker offers you just that.

What do you do with that time you save creating Twitter variations? You use it to create engagement on the platform in other ways; join in a Twitter hour, connect with more peers, answer more of your DMs and reach out to new marketing collaboration partners.

This was a guest post written by Sara Millis of My Indie Life Blog, a freelance content marketing manager and user of PostMaker.io

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