For several years, savvy bloggers have used the scheduling features of blog software to write posts in advance and have them published in the future (see How to Schedule Blog Posts). What about tweets? Should you schedule those as well?
Should You Schedule Tweets?
While scheduling blog posts is universally seen as a good practice, there is a bit of disagreement amongst some social media users about the practice of scheduling tweets. The mechanics are similar (write a tweet and schedule it for later – see below for specifics) but some feel that Twitter is more personal and more conversational; some feel that scheduling a future tweet removes the personal angle and isn’t genuine.
On the other hand, since Twitter is a transitory medium, if someone doesn’t happen to see your tweet because they’re not online when you post it, they probably won’t see it at all. A couple months ago I asked the question if it made sense to post blog links multiple times on Twitter and talked about how posting a link a few times makes sense to reach different Twitter audiences depending on the time of day (or even the day of the week). If we’re going to tweet something for a certain time, doesn’t it make sense to use a service to automate that tweet?
I think that using scheduled tweets as one part of your social marketing toolbox makes sense. I still post nearly all of my tweets manually, but I’ve started using a scheduler to tweets links for things at times of day when I might not be close to my computer (or I might forget). As long as you don’t start relying on scheduled tweets as your main method of tweeting, readers should find the tweets useful and not overwhelming.
How to Schedule Tweets
My favorite way to schedule tweets is with the scheduler now available in the new version of TweetDeck. It’s darned simple. Just type out your tweet, but instead of clicking on the “Send” button, click on the button with a small clock icon:
Enter the time to send the tweet, and click “Set Time.” That’s it. At the given hour, your tweet will be posted just as if you’d done it manually via TweetDeck.
I do want to note that a few folks have reported issues with the new scheduling feature of TweetDeck… it has worked fine for me and I’m not sure if the problems are very widespread but at least one Social Photo Talk reader has expressed concerns.
Don’t use TweetDeck? I know that HootSuite offers this same functionality, and there’s a standalone scheduled tweet service called Twuffer.
Do you Schedule? What Do You Think?
What’s your take on this? Do you schedule tweets? Think it’s a good idea? Think it’s too impersonal?
Photo by ericskiff, used under Creative Commons licensing
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