People have been lovely in terms of helping me promote my new book, but one thing that really surprised me was the number of folk who said, “I’ve scheduled a tweet about it”. I’ve never scheduled a tweet in my life, my Twitter account ranges from business stuff, to web dev, to photos of my cat as and when I feel like it.
I just wondered what other people were using to do this, is Buffer the top choice if I were to want to schedule Tweets about my cat on a regular basis?
I know a couple of people are using Hootsuite which integrates with all the main social networks out there. It’s got scheduling, analytics and a few other nifty features.
I use HootSuite as well, I’m not a regular twitterer with my business account, so it helps to just sit down on Mondays and write a bunch of tweets and have them scheduled. Make sure you have the mobile app with you though so you can cancel a scheduled tweet, there is absolutely nothing worse than some tragedy happening (school shooting, plane crash, etc…), and your business it tweeting something glib.
Scheduling tweets can be handy for a busy person, but I’d be wary of overdoing it.
There is a UX “expert” in my local area who tweets the same thing day after day after day. That picture of Don Norman at an event she organized? She auto-tweets it several times per week. it’s ridiculous.
It’s fine to automate some tweets, but remember that the people who are reading are not automatons.
Personally I think the beauty of Twitter is its instant and direct mode of communication. When I sense that someone I’m following is more robot than human, I unfollow.
You don’t need a service if all you’re doing is scheduling a tweet. Tweetdeck will let you schedule any tweet, as long as you’re not attaching an image.
I’ve been using Buffer for 6-9 months now and definitely recommend their service.
Agree with not automating too much- your readers will see you are just throwing out tweets with no interaction. That’s how big fortune 500 type companies behave, do we really want to emulate them?
That said, automating tweets is a good idea if done very occasionally. There are plugins that will automatically tweet and FB your blog, for example. That way, readers who don’t subscribe via email/Rss will know about your latest post. I don’t use this service, but I have seen people use it. These were people who were interacting a lot, so the occasional automated tweet didn’t matter.
I’d use Tweetdeck. For a long time, I preferred Hootsuite, but then they started harassing me (logging me off for no reason, forcing me to login constantly, changing the UI etc), and I decided I’d had enough of them. Now I stick to the default web UI from Twitter, or Tweetdeck.
I’ve gone through periods where I’ve pre-written a whole series of Twitter posts. It definitely helps in this case to spread them out and schedule them.
More people are going to see your Tweet (or Facebook post, or blog post) at 10 AM on a Tuesday rather than 2 AM on a Saturday.
I use Twuffer for tweet scheduling.
+1 for Hootsuite. I personally don’t schedule tweets but my writer does. Scheduling makes it easy to make sure you have regular content, and allows my writer to just do it all at the beginning of the week.
I agree with @Simon - the time of day is a factor in visibility of tweets. Also, with Hootsuite you can post the same message to Facebook, G+ etc.
You can schedule tweets using the Twitter Ads interface at http://ads.twitter.com/
Anyone can signup and you won’t have to give them your credit card to schedule tweets.
Once you sign up click on the Tweet icon and selected Scheduling, relatively easy and unlikely to get shutdown considering it is Twitter and all.
I schedule tweets occasionally through Buffer. Usually it’s about a new blog post or some other news item that I want to tweet out but it’s later in the night. I schedule these for the next morning so I more people will see them and I’ll actually be awake to interact with them.
You guys should check out Sproutsocial. http://sproutsocial.com/. It’s an awesome service for scheduling and much easier to use than Hottsuite in my opinion for my startup The Coder Factory (https://thecoderfactory.com/). But yes, it’s also important not to spoon feed the same tweets over and over again with no interaction.
I also use HootSuite and love it.
I had chosen them over Buffer because I’m a “heavy tweet scheduler” (if there is such a term) and need to be able to upload a bulk of tweets to be scheduled. In one account, I have tweets scheduled out a full year.
Back when I evaluated these two services, Buffer didn’t have the ability to bulk-schedule lots of tweets. (It looks like they do now though.) Also, if you’re going to purchase a premium plan, HootSuite is a bit cheaper ($8.99/mo as opposed to $10/mo).
This. This. This.
I have a couple of actual real-life friends who auto-tweet “11 things that your cat knows about business” and the like - they are not long for my timeline.
Be more signal, less noise. A little self-promotion is fine. But be a human if your face is on your account.