Twitter Introduces Scheduled Tweets

Twitter recently launched a feature that has digital marketers and social media specialists everywhere doing dances of delight at our desks: the long-awaited scheduled tweet! While platforms such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite have allowed people to schedule tweets for some time, there has never been a way to manage it from directly within Twitter itself. The annoyance of having to use a third party platform and take that extra step is finally eliminated.

According to Twitter, tweets can be scheduled as often as every minute, and as far as a year in advance. Scheduled tweets can be coordinated with new or existing Promoted Tweet campaigns  and the feature works for non-promoted tweets as well, meaning this isn’t limited to tweets that businesses specifically pay for.

Right now the feature is only available to marketers using Twitter’s ad platform – it’s accessed from within Twitter Ads – but we’re thinking they’ll roll it out to everyone in the coming months.  We played around with it in our offices, and while it’s not perfect or as user friendly as some of the third-party platforms we’ve used, it does have one thing that we love: you can schedule tweets WITH images. We can practically hear the whoops of joy from social media specialists everywhere. Before this development from Twitter, the only platform that offered this capability was Hootsuite, but it has a pretty serious bug with the feature that causes images to show up sideways…

The bottom line: This is a very welcome development for those of us that manage a multitude of accounts, but it’s also a smart move on the part of Twitter. Many social media marketers pay for third-party services. Those advertising dollars could now go directly into Twitter’s pockets. Of course, the ability to schedule tweets is a convenient feature for day-to-day conversation management, but at Delucchi Plus we also believe that timely and relevant content is key to social success. Our advice? Embrace scheduling within reason, ensure the content is still current, and always allow time and air space for real-time conversation.

Sources: Twitter.com, Mashable, Technorati