In Twitter, several of us discussed the ups and downs of scheduling tweets. Then I read Should you schedule your tweets? I love Twitter and I could easily read tweets all day and engage in a variety of fascinating tweetversations. Instead, I created a habit to avoid letting Twitter and its fail whale swallow me up. Every morning, I check Twitter and schedule tweets based on other people’s responses. Some tweets are replies to statements or questions. Some are RT. Some are adding two cents to someone’s tweet.
I also reply live to whatever is happening while I’m doing all this — but I take care not to do multiple replies too quickly. Let’s say I see two tweets worth a response. I’ll respond to one right away. After that goes out, I respond to the second one and wait a few minutes before pressing “Send.” While I wait, I read more tweets. Why do this? I don’t want to appear two, three or more times in someone’s Twitter stream page.
When people reply to my tweets, I don’t pay attention to the time unless we’re in the middle of a conversation. If I tweet something in the morning and the respondent schedules a reply in the afternoon, it works for me. I always check for responses and follow up. For timely items, I’ll schedule the tweet when they need to go.
I’ll check in Twitter again around mid-day and sometimes at the end of the day for follow ups and more live tweeting.
It works for me. This lets me engage all day without sacrificing my work or family time.
Those who say it’s not a good idea to schedule tweets often refer to those who tweet resources or self-promo links without any engagement, mentions or replies without a link. I think this approach is a compromise.
Over to you: What do you think of scheduling tweets? What’s the right way and wrong way to do it? How do you balance time on Twitter and social networks with your life?
2 thoughts on “Is It OK to Schedule Tweets on Twitter?”
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Meryl, this does seem to be a good compromise. Where folks lose credibility is when they schedule self promoting/marketing tweets too close together. it also makes them look particularly bad when those tweets show up during a timely news event such as the Gifford shooting or the Bin Laden incident.
This is a good clarification post and I hope folks take heed.
George
I think that’s what people are referring to when they say automatic tweets aren’t a good thing. You know there are no rules in Twitter — but there is common sense.