You’ve gone ahead and created a Twitter account for your business, and it’s quickly become apparent that keeping up on this medium is going to take up a lot of your time. In this article we’ll give you the low down on what tools to use to help manage the time burn.
Tweeting, replying, re-tweeting, building followers, following other people, keeping up with the never ending timeline.. Twitter can be pretty hectic if you don’t manage your time on it effectively. Thankfully, there are a number of tools on the market to help you be more effective and not lose half your day on the platform. The tools we’ll look at here are ones to help you with scheduling tweets, so before we look at these, it’s important to iterate that tweeting is only a small part of using Twitter. Like all social platforms, engagement is key so be sure to allocate at least 10 or 20 minutes per day to interacting with your Twitter followers and promoting other peoples content.
With the rapidly moving timeline, it’s obviously not feasible for someone to have a constant presence as you’d need to be logged in 24/7. This is where tweet scheduling tools come in very handy. They allow you to prepare your tweets in advance, hence you can choose a time that’s convenient for you to sit down and prepare your tweets for a certain time period. There are many tweet scheduling tools on the market, however the following three have established reputations as high quality services.
Buffer is great for people starting out with tweet scheduling. What makes it great is that you simply input your tweets, and the app automatically places them in a queue and publishes them at times deemed to gain the most coverage by the app. Once you get a bit more comfortable with the process, you may also choose to start customizing the times based on results you’ve achieved. The free version of Buffer allows you to insert up to 10 tweets into your queue, which is plenty to start with. Paid options allow you to place more into your queue and have multiple users and accounts. Buffer has recently added Facebook posting as well, which will be of benefit to anyone utilizing both Facebook and Twitter in their online marketing initiative.
This tool allows you to schedule as many tweets as you like, at any time in the day. In addition to the tweet scheduling, this tool also has some other handy functionality including the ability to send pre-formatted DM’s (direct messages) to new followers, as well as automatically following back new followers. There is a fee for using this tool, however it does offer quite good value for the pricing.
Hootsuite is one of the leading social media dashboards, and offers a vast and constantly expanding array of functionality. It’s tweet scheduling functionality is quite good and like social oomph, allows you to schedule as many tweets as you want at any time. Its publisher layout makes it very easy to view upcoming tweets in your schedule, and it also offers a ‘bulk upload’ function for scheduling multiple tweets at once via a spreadsheet.
Test them out
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and the tools and applications for using it are moving in line. There are new tools hitting the market almost daily, and existing ones are always adding functionality to remain competitive. There is no one tool that is perfect for everyone. The one’s discussed above are very solid though, and would do a good job for a wide range of users. The best way to find the tool that will suit you is to trial a few different ones. Many of these, particularly tweet scheduling ones, offer free or trial versions so it’s quite easy to test the water. Even if you find a tool that works well for you, remember to keep an eye on what’s coming out as there’s always opportunity to use your time more effectively.
What tools do you use to manage your Twitter activity?
