The Big Heart Network - the North West's marketing skills and support network for charities and social enterprises - share their top Twitter tips  Do you feel overwhelmed by social media? Has it started to feel like a massive time suck? Maintaining a professional and productive online presence can be hard graft especially for organisations facing staff or budget constraints.  But take heart! We have four time-saving Twitter tips that will make you fall back in love with the social media channel that never stops tweeting.  Define your audience  Tweeting out great content all hours of the day and getting no interaction can be soul-destroying. So sit back and take stock.  Decide who you really want to reach. Are you keen to position your organisation as expert in its sector, do want to keep staff and volunteers up to date, attract the interest of the media or reach current supporters and potential donors?  Once you have zeroed in on the target audience, work out when they will be online for the best chance of your tweet being seen by them.  Use analytic tools available in Twitter or another app to confirm the optimum time through test tweets.  Content calendar  Trying to come up with new ideas every morning is stressful and the quality of the content does suffer.  Stop right now! Instead take time to construct a media calendar, populated with your organisation's events, campaigns, key occasions in your sector and external diary dates. Breaking news can be posted around these diaried events - instant inspiration and you will never forget to tweet about an important date ever again.  Curate rather create  It is hugely time-consuming to create enough original matter to populate a Twitter feed. The message becomes monotonous if your audience is only ever hearing one voice. So, to kill two birds with one stone follow the rule of thirds. For every original tweet, retweet another account and reply to someone else.  Using the quote retweet function allows you another 140 words to add a commentary to expand your thoughts on the original tweet.  The rule of thirds provides variety, additional value, encourages engagement as well as positions your organisation as a thought leader in its sector  A word of warning: make sure you only direct retweet trustworthy sources and read or watch links in their entirety to avoid any unpleasant surprises.  Time-saving tools  Don't get caught in the cycle of having to post tweets 'live'. Set aside some time to schedule a number of tweets in advance using tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite. It an especially efficient way to deal with diaried events from your content calendar.  In the same vein, Hootlet is a free browser plugin which allows you to immediately add shortened page URL and a message with the link's title to your Hootsuite schedule without having to open Hootsuite and copy the link across – great for quick curated content. Grace Dyke is Strategic Director at PR and Communications social enterprise, Yellow Jigsaw. The Yellow Jigsaw team manage PR and fundraising campaigns for regional and national charities, as well as managing the North West's only dedicated skills and support network for charities and social enterprises, the Big Heart Network.  Big Heart Network puts its heart and soul into helping charities and social enterprises. Contact us on hello@yellowjigsaw.co.uk and visit our page to see when the next lunch and learn social media sessions will be held. Found this blog post useful? You may also like:    Local Hero: The half way leaders are... Do you have the courage to let your supporters own their story? 7 digital tactics for small charities in volatile times