Professional Twitter creators will tell you that you should send 1-3 tweets per day, one or two weekly threads, and engage with other creators’ content several times daily. This is a big ask for a part-time volunteer like the VPPR of a Toastmasters club, but it is possible if you are smart about it.
Here are some suggestions for where you can source content to achieve that:
- Club Meetings: The natural place to start is your club events. It would be best if you aim to send out your meeting notifications at least a week before each meeting and then retweet them a day or two before the event itself. For a typical club that meets biweekly, that will account for one tweet per week.
- Club special events: there will be occasional special events, such as club contests, that you can promote with extra social media messaging.
- Sister club events: you can retweet the meeting announcements from sister clubs in your area or district, especially if they are exceptional in some way. Many clubs have a signature event (see our meeting-theme database for some examples), and you should be helping your sister clubs to promote such meetings. Ideally, you should get to know the VPPR of those clubs and agree that they will also retweet your content when needed.
- Other club-generated content: at the time of writing in 2023, Rochester Chamber Toastmasters (@ChamberTmasters) has been running interesting content under headings like Monday Motivational, Thesaurus Thursday and Friday Funnies. You can retweet that content to your own audience, so providing value to them.
- Toastmasters International or District content: you can retweet content from Toastmasters organizations above the club level.
- Retweet Public Speaking creators: you should follow Twitter accounts that produce original content about public speaking. One of those accounts will have some content you will be happy to retweet on any given day. You should follow my account @WeWriteSpeeches, and I would also recommend @Public_Speaker_ and @TheJoelTruth for good content.
- Repurpose other people’s content using Quote Tweets: For example, I am currently producing a weekly series where I tweet about rhetorical devices. If a local personality gives a speech that uses a rhetorical device that I have tweeted about (for example, Anaphora or Anadiplosis), you could tweet a portion of the speech, pointing out good usage of the rhetorical device, and link to my tweet as the second tweet in your thread (and, in doing so, jump on a trending topic). If you are lucky, you might be able to rope your club’s VP of Education (VPE) into helping with such educational content. However, in my experience, the VPE is usually even more overwhelmed with work than the VPPR is.
- Develop other original content on public speaking: Some Pathways projects require club members to produce blogs and podcasts. You can use that content as a basis for a Tweet or a thread.
When you are developing original content, you should bear in mind that Tweets with images or videos:
- will be given priority by the algorithm (so are more likely to be put in front of users than text-only tweets)
- are more attractive to Twitter users than text-only content.
- takes up more screen real estate than a text-only Tweet, so a user can’t ignore it if it appears on the timeline.
In other words, you should always create a flyer when promoting your club events.
Do not steal content and present it as your own. It is far better to use a ‘Quote Tweet’ to add your own comment to the original author’s tweet. That helps them, and they are more likely to help you back (which might be as simple as liking your retweet).
Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Planning | Part 3: Content Strategy | Part 4: Audience Building
