There are various platforms that allow you to schedule tweets in advance. In this article I'll take a look at the pros and cons of doing this and how it can affect your business.
What is tweet scheduling?
Tweet scheduling is being able to prepare your messages on Twitter and have them send automatically on a day and time of your choosing.
What are the advantages of scheduling tweets?
- Covering holidays/business trips
If you're a regular Twitter user and you've got some time off booked for a holiday or business trip, then tweet scheduling can be very useful. Using software such as Hootsuite, you can quickly and easily write tweets to go out every day you know you're going to be away so there isn't a sudden wall of silence for your followers.
- Avoiding information overload
There may be times when you've got lots you want to tweet about but don't want to bombard people with everything in one day. Scheduling your tweets over a couple of days may be the best approach so you don't annoy your followers and each of your individual tweets gets more attention.
- Easier to manage your time
When you don't have much time for social media because of running your business day-to-day, scheduling your tweets is a good way to get around this problem. For example, on a Monday morning you could schedule your messages for an entire week then not have to worry about trying to find the time every day.
What are the disadvantages of scheduling tweets?
- Things can change quickly
Lots of industries move at a very fast pace. If you rely solely on scheduled tweets, you may miss an important topic or end up tweeting something inappropriate. There was an instance of this recently when a scheduled tweet by Tesco went out mentioning "hitting the hay" the same day the horse meat scandal broke.
- You might miss important conversations
If you rely purely on scheduled tweets for your Twitter activity, there's every chance you'll miss out on important conversations that are going on in your sector. You could also have people asking you questions directly, and it doesn't look good if you don't respond quickly.
- Your account can look a bit robotic
There are plenty of Twitter accounts that just use scheduled tweets and nothing else. The problem with these is they are missing the whole point of social media by just broadcasting rather than interacting. When someone looks at your Twitter timeline, it will be obvious if you're just posting out scheduled tweets and nothing else.