5 Reasons to Schedule Tweets

Many including myself have said that “Scheduled Tweets” are bad and go against the norms of social media. In a general sense we are correct, why tweet when you’re not around to respond since the majority of people use scheduled tweets to say something during the night when they are a sleep or keep their twitter stream active when they’re not available (on a plane, on vacation, etc.). But like all guidelines there can be no absolutes, so here are 10 reasons why schedule tweets are OK to use and how to use them correctly.

1. Deferring a Tweet – you’re up late and spot important something that you want to tweet or Retweet but know that the majority of your followers are asleep. So why not queue up that tweet to go out several hours later when they’ll see it in their streams and of course you’ll be on-line at that time;
2. Follow Friday Recommendations – I frequently have to bend my brain backwards and think back every Friday of who I want to recommend and why. So I’ve now started to recommend people as they inspire me, but I set that #ff hashtag and schedule the Tweet for Friday (at a time of course that I’ll be on-line);
3. Event reminders – you know of an event that you want to help promote and you came up with a killer Tweet. So off it goes but you want to remember to resend that tweet or a variation of it out at key times. So why not copy the tweet and schedule it. Of course make sure they’re schedule for times you are most likely to be on-line;
4. Slowing your stream down - You’re on a roll, flipping through daily reading list at the speed of light and have discovered so much to Tweet out. Yet you don’t want to overload your follower's Twitter streams, so take a deep breath before hitting that “Tweet Now” button and schedule them with perhaps a 5, 10 or maybe 15 minute gap.
5. Content Promotion – you’ve taken the time to write that blog post and as soon as it’s done off goes a tweet to promote it. Great, but we all know that most tweets go unseen by most of our followers. So we then have to remember to send out a tweet again a few hours later or perhaps even the next day. So why not schedule these tweets! There’s nothing wrong with it as long as you plan on being on-line when they are scheduled to go out.

In essence there is nothing wrong with scheduling tweets, provided you’re going to be on-line when they go out and can respond to people if the comment on it on Twitter. I also like to review any tweets I have scheduled at least once a day, to make sure I’ll be on-line when they do go out, to double check for typos and if I know I’m not going to be around when they are scheduled, I reschedule them for a more appropriate time.