20 Tweets in 60 Minutes: My 5-step Content Creation System

Have you tried sitting down with your hands on your keyboard to write content and end up blanking out?

Exactly. 

Here I want to share with you my 5-step workflow to easily create and publish content on Twitter.

Writing, or creating content, requires many parts of your brain and they can't work well at the same time. You need to split it up into 5 steps:

1. Ideation - capture your best ideas
2. Outlining - give your ideas more depth and add structure
3. Writing - turn your outline into appealing stories
4. Editing - make sure it flows well; check grammar mistakes and typos
5. Scheduling - put your tweets into a tool

Ok - let's go!

Step 1: Slack for jotting down ideas

I have been avoiding Slack as I find it extremely distracting to focus on my work, but finally, I find a use case for it.

As I mentioned above, ideas come at any time. I've found that ideas mostly come when I'm consuming content, e.g. reading a book, reading what others are saying, watching a video, etc.

So when an idea comes to mind, I need the easiest way to take them down - via my mobile phone.

But taking notes on a mobile phone can be tricky.

I don't like taking notes directly on Notion because there are too many clicks before I get to type. And because I use it for note-taking or todos, I have too many pages there and can easily be distracted.

I figure if I have the Slack app for one purpose, taking down ideas, then it requires one click to open the app and start writing. I don't have any other workspaces on my mobile Slack app so I'm not distracted. And my gut feeling is that Slack also loads up faster than other apps.

I created a channel called tweet-ideas and type directly on it.

Step 2: Notion for storing ideas

While Slack is a great idea-taking app, it is not a great app to store my tweet ideas because I cannot store them, move them around, or archive them.

I want to be able to pick which tweet idea I want to expand on, write it, then archive it from the database.

Notion does this step well.

I set up a table called Tweet Ideas and leave it empty.

Step 3: Use Make to send ideas from Slack to Notion

I'm not going to manually copy the tweet ideas from Slack to Notion, so I need a tool to help me bridge them.

Luckily, it is extremely easy to do this kind of logic thanks to all the NoCode automation tools.

I signed up for a free Make account and set up this scenario to happen whenever it is triggered. 

 Here I want to show you the exact configuration on both ends:

Lastly, because I’m using a free account, I want this automation to run only once every day.

Of course, you can also use Zapier. I'm using Make because my free Zapier account is max-ed out.

Step 4: Expand tweet ideas into real tweets via Hypefury

Every Monday, I open up my Notion Tweet Ideas table alongside my Hypefury account and start writing.

I also wrote a separate article on how I automate my Twitter growth using Hypefury.

Since I have all the ideas jotted down, it is unbelievably quick for me to focus on the storytelling techniques to make it a valuable tweet. I write the tweet or thread and click "Add to Queue" on Hypefury, then I remove it from the Notion table.

With this workflow, I can easily write 10-20 tweets in an hour for 1-2 weeks worth of tweet content, which is good for the whole week. 

And because I'm not squeezing the ideas out based on one brainstorming block, the ideas tend to be more valuable.

Watch this in action. I recommend watching at 2x speed.

Step 5: Final review and edit

I’m putting the “Editing” step at the end because I still have plenty of time to review the tweets before they’re scheduled to go out.

I can do it on a different day so that I get into the “editing” mode checking for grammar mistakes or typos or if I want to rephrase something.

I hope this 5-step content creation system shows you how to split up the steps and do each one effectively and efficiently.

What’s your ideal system look like? Let’s chat more! Send me a message on Twitter!