If you work the same hours every day and use Twitter to promote your business/website/blog, could you be missing out on a ton of potential traffic because you are not Tweeting at the best time for you?
People use Twitter in many different ways and you may never see a Tweet from someone you follow (and vice versa) if you both live in different timezones. Being able to send Tweets when you are away from your computer is the ideal solution as these could be picked up by your followers in their timeline without the need for your followers to do anything more than use Twitter in the default manner.
You can send Tweets from a mobile phone, which is good for incidental comments about the train you are riding on (or waiting for, if you live in the UK), but it may be more difficult to send a Tweet from a mobile phone if you would like to include a link to a blog article you have recently posted or read.
This is where Tweet Later comes to the rescue
Tweet Later comes in two versions – free and professional. The free version allows you to manage unlimited Twitter accounts and schedule Tweets from those accounts to suit your preferences. It is possible to do so much more using TweetLater, but for the sake of this article, I am going to concentrate on sending Tweets at different times of the day.
Once you have created your Tweet Later account and logged in you can add your Twitter accounts. This is done by clicking on the +Twitter button and completing the form. There are several options available which allow a degree of automation for when people follow or stop following you. These are all switched off by default, but you can activate them by clicking the radio button.
The options are:
- Auto Welcome
- Message Sending Method
- Send This Message
- Auto Follow
- Vet Followers
- Auto Unfollow
This is what each option will do:
Auto Welcome
Tick this if you would like to send people who follow you an automated message. I have mixed feelings about these messages. Some are a blatant sales pitch, but others are much more polite and just offer a simple greeting. I have only recently set up an Auto Welcome message and it says something like “Hi, thanks for the follow – I look forward to reading your Tweets”.
Message Sending Method
This option cannot be changed – all Auto Welcome messages are sent as Direct Messages
Send This Message
Create the welcome message to send to your new followers using up to 120 characters. Be polite, say hello and keep it short (you have no choice about keeping it short!)
Auto Follow
Personally, I follow the majority of people who follow me, but I don’t follow everyone. This is purely down to personal choice.
Vet Followers
If you select this option the previous automation options will only be executed once you have manually approved a new follower with the Vet New Followers feature. If this option is not selected, the above automation actions will take place without intervention.
Auto Unfollow
Do you want to stop following the people who follow you? If so, tick this box.
Once you have made your selections, click save and enter the Timezone section to ensure the setting is correct.
Set up scheduled Tweets
The next step is the setup of the Tweets you would like to schedule. Click on Main in the navigation menu and Add a New Scheduled Tweet in the menu on the next screen (see below).
Once again there are several options available to you which allow you to create a Tweet and schedule it for a predefined amount of minutes, hours, days or weeks ahead. If you decide to do so, you can even publish the Tweet straight away or at a particular time on a particular date (based upon your timezone).
This is the form you use to add a scheduled Tweet (click for a better view)
At the bottom of the form you can see my Twitter account is highlighted blue. If I had multiple Twitter accounts in my TweetLater account, you would see them listed here. If I wanted to send the scheduled Tweet to all my Twitter accounts I could do so by holding the CTRL key on my keyboard and clicking on the account name I would like to publish the Tweet to.
That is all you have to do to setup a scheduled Tweet.
If you track the progress of those Tweets, you will be able to see if there actually is a “best time to Tweet”.
Good luck, I would really like to know your thoughts on Tweeting this way and if Tweet scheduling has benefited (or not) you and your websites/business.
I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful. If so, please consider tweeting it or sharing it in another way.
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