Idea for an X/Twitter promition via a thread...

[1WhoConquers]

Did you know that one of the positive traits of a computer programmer is laziness? It's true. A good programmer will never do anything repetitive. If I have to do it more than twice, I'd rather write a computer program to do it for me.

That's also true of things not related to programming. For instance when I started exploring all the powerful features of my new favorite social media scheduling app, Fedica, the gears in the brain really started turning. Especially things like setting up RSS feeds from Zazzle to auto-post new products spread out over a schedule. Because I have this tendency to create entire collections in less than an hour, and I don't want all of that going to my Pinterest or X feeds all at once. But that's a topic for a different article. 

What I want to share here is an idea I had for a coffee mug promotion, and specifically a plan I came up with when I started doing VIDEOS for my coffee mugs. Because my mugs feature landscape artwork that wraps around from one end to the other, they're hard to appreciate unless one has the patience to click on all the mock-up pics to see them in sequence. So I decided that each mug should have a SLIDESHOW that easily shows all the angles.

Now here's where X/Twitter comes in. Threads and #hashtags. I decided to do a series to promote specifically mugs that feature beautiful artwork, and I set it up as a THREAD of tweets. Here's how I did it...

1. Tweet one introduces the series and what folks should expect, and showcases the hashtag #CoffeeMugArtShowcase (that link will take you to X in a new window)
2. Each subsequent tweet in the thread will feature the mug video uploaded to X, with (of course) a link to the product on Zazzle. The plan is to add one new mug to the thread every 24 hours. I'll do 8 or 9 mugs in the series and then collect some data on how well it's doing.
3. That's were Fedica comes in. Sure, X has a scheduler built-in now. But the scheduler can't do threads. And I really want threads for this, because when people stumble across a tweet with a new mug, they should be able to "follow the conversation" and see all the other mug videos. Sure they might probably do that with the #CoffeeMugArtShowcase hashtag. But that's open territory for other people's posts, the thread is MY series. Where Fedica shines here is that you can schedule threads. In other words, I don't have to have all the mugs pop up all at once (defeats the purpose). Not only that, you can specify how long a period of time between tweets in the thread. In this case, you guessed it, 24 hours, and I just pumped all my mug video tweets into the thread all at once, and it's set to crank out new mugs to X for over a week without me having to touch the thing. And Fedica has something called "pipelines". I set up a new pipeline JUST for the coffee mug video promotion, and now I can easily see things like how people are responding to that pipeline, and how many are clicking through to Zazzle. 

Now let's see if it works as an effective promo technique. How about you? Can you think of other products or collections that would work well as a series? I'll post back here when I have some results.

[Connie]

It sounds really interesting! Do you use just the free version of Fedica? I don't understand all that scheduling stuff, but I probably should learn. When I make a big collection all at once, I try to pin a few products at a time, and then go back later and pin some more. But a lot of times I forget to pin the rest of the products!

[1WhoConquers]

I use the Premium, but that's mainly for the advanced data analysis stuff. I was on the free version for quite a while before I decided to give a paid plain a shot for at least a month to see how it goes. As to functionality, the big difference is this:

First, BOTH are better than X's default scheduling, because you can schedule THREADS. Now, the difference between the Free and the Grow plan that I use is this... in the free version, you can schedule threads, but when the thread posts, all the tweets in the thread post at once. You don't have the option to spread them out over time to garner a wider audience who are online at different times, and then hopefully will read the OTHER stuff in the thread that posted back when they weren't online.

But here's the thing. That logic only works if you're on a Premium version of X. Because in the FREE version, ALMOST NO ONE will see the "replies" that you wrote, unless they're the AUTHOR of the tweet you just replied to, and for a thread, that's YOU. That's what I found out the hard way. The FIRST tweet in my post would get hundreds of views, and then the rest of the tweets in the thread got less than a dozen. EVERY TIME. I thought that would change when I went with a paid plan and spread out the timing on the thread tweets. But no, no change. And besides shelling out some bucks, the only other way to get that increased exposure is to get X's Premium status the old fashioned way. 2500 followers.