Overwhelmed with Twitter? How to Utilize Social Media Scheduling

It is no secret that promoting your company website and content via social media is a great idea. For this reason, hundreds of social media networks have been created and have tried to make it in the world of social networking. While most companies branch out to several different networks, almost all companies have a presence in at least the three major networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (with Google+ slowly moving up the totem pole). All three of these networks can (and should) be used for promotion, but generally users use LinkedIn to connect on a professional level, Facebook to connect with friends, and Twitter to find company deals and information.  This makes Twitter one of the most used networks for company promotion.

Many marketing departments juggle between company and personal Twitter accounts. You want to promote your content on both accounts, but this can certainly get confusing. You want to make sure that you aren’t tweeting the same messages on all of your accounts at the same time, yet you don’t want to constantly go back to all of your content every three hours for both accounts. You also have to worry about promoting your content at least twice per day, adding yet another layer of stress. This is where scheduling tweets becomes extremely important whether you’re starting a business or just looking to improve your current one.

Top 3 Ways to Schedule Your Tweets

Scheduling your tweets is simply a way to stay organized. This will allow you to see something and tweet it at a specific time as opposed to at the very moment you are viewing the article. Instead of having to remember to go back to your content, you can just schedule a tweet right on the site.

Many companies have caught onto the fact that scheduling tweets is important, so there are a few different tools you can use to schedule tweets. You may find that a combination of some of these tools works great. Consider some of the tools below that you can use:

• Social Media Dashboards– Social media dashboards help a user keep several different Twitter accounts lined up side by side. This will help you see what you’re tweeting on one account versus another account, so you will always be able to make sure nothing is being duplicated. It will also lay out side by side the different feeds from each of your accounts. I highly recommend installing either TweetDeck or HootSuite, two of the most popular dashboards, to help you visualize your tweets. The dashboards also have a scheduling option if you click the little clock. Below is a screenshot of my TweetDeck:
  

   

  
  

  As you can see, the blue arrow is pointing to the account where I am planning to schedule my tweet. The red arrow is showing how I would go about scheduling a tweet. You can see in the background all of my accounts lined up so that I’m always in the loop about the activity of my accounts. This works especially well if you have several people tweeting from one account. For example, both myself and my co-worker have access to our company Twitter account, so we have to make sure that we aren’t scheduling tweets at the same time. TweetDeck makes this easy.

• Buffer – This site is a great place to schedule tweets because you only have to choose the times you’d like to tweet once. In other words, all you have to do is add a tweet to what is called your Buffer, and then it will automatically tweet at a time you decided long ago. For example, if I were surfing the Internet and saw an article I wanted to Tweet, all I would need to do is hit my Buffer extension and it would automatically go into a lineup of tweets. There is no need to remember when you last tweeted something or on what account—Buffer will make sure that doesn’t happen. You can see a screenshot of my tweeting schedule to the right. 
  
  The biggest downfall to Buffer is the idea that you have to pay for multiple accounts. Therefore, I use Buffer as a way to tweet on my personal account only as I surf the Internet and come across articles that I want to share. Some companies, however, may find that a paid version is worth the money depending on the frequency of your tweeting. 

• Timely.is – This tool is extremely similar to Buffer except it’s free to schedule tweets on multiple accounts. You can also download a Timely extension so that when you see something you want to tweet, you simply click the icon and the tweet will go into a set schedule. While the schedule is created by you when utilizing Buffer, Timely sets the schedule for you based upon your past tweets and when you are most likely to make a difference. You can either choose whether or not you want to tweet on the weekends or not, but you do not get to choose which days you tweet. For many companies this isn’t very significant, but some prefer to schedule their own tweets. I generally use Buffer when I’m surfing around the Internet and Timely when I’m promoting my own content all at once. Below is a screenshot of my Timely account:

All three of these scheduling tools are easy to use, but the best part is the fact that they are easy to use together. If you add Buffer and Timely extensions to your browser, all you need is one click of a button and a tweet is created for you and scheduled for you. TweetDeck is probably better used to see tweets as opposed to scheduling tweets, but it still serves an important function when it comes to staying organized with Twitter.

Whether you’re looking to simply share information you find on the web or looking to promote your company’s content, scheduling is the absolute quickest and most effective way to make this happen.

Have you ever used one or all of these tools to help schedule tweets? Which do you find works best?

Photo Credit: wms.to

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to credit card processing. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.