Being a reliable source is first base when it comes to running your own social media channel.

Being known as reliable makes sense. You wouldn’t think much of a daily newspaper that only published an edition when it felt like it.

In the same way, a social media channel should be consistent.

This is especially true on the micro-blogging social network Twitter, where posts don’t hang around to be discovered days later (as is the case with Facebook or Blogging).

As Kevin Claveria points out in his post social media marketing is about consistency, “a haphazard approach confuses people”.

But how do you build a consistent tweeting habit?

You need to do two things:

1. have a plan
2. see if you stick to it

Firstly, you need a plan (or at least an idea in your head) of when you are going to post and how often. Either write once a day or write twenty times a day, at the weekend or during the nights. It’s up to you when you do it, but whatever you do, be consistent. Simply tweeting when you feel like it, doesn’t really work – it makes your twitter channel seem unreliable.

Secondly, sticking to a plan is all about scheduling some space once a week to see if you’ve done what you planned to do.

In our busy lives this optimisation and analysis step is often missed but it’s super critical. As Mark Pincus of Zynga points out “what’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to analyse the results?”

A great way to do this regularly is to join a club of other people trying to do the same thing. There’s nothing like peer pressure to keep you at the top of your game.

We’ve introducing a new free club to help you and your business build a Twitter Consistency habit – it’s called the Twitter Activity Club.

It’s designed to track your activity on Twitter and give you feedback on how you’re doing.

Once you join, you’ll get a weekly reminder email, showing how consistently you tweeted in the past week. It will also compare your weekly Tweet rates (number of tweets per day) over time and compare these to others also working to develop a more consistent tweeting habit.

Once you spend that bit of time each week to check your Twitter output was consistent, you can also tell whether it compared to your weekly plan and modify next week’s behaviour to suit.

Pretty soon your Twitter channel will be consistent and developing its own fan base of trusting readers.