How To Tweet to Your Followers When You’re Away from Twitter: Basic Guide to Scheduling Tweets

Whether you’re working as a community manager or you’re just a simple Twitter addict who loves to share interesting links with his or her followers, you can’t sit at your computer literary 24/7. You shouldn’t! But then again, so many links to share and so little time, right? Some work needs to get done, too.

There are some tools that can help you; they’re Twitter applications which can schedule your tweets to be sent at some time in the future. Wouldn’t it be great if you could schedule a bunch of tweets to go out during the night, while you’re sleeping and catching up with your mentions in the morning? Or to schedule them to be posted during the day so you can take care of your business while your online alter-ego does its job?

HootSuite

HootSuite is a dashboard-like web application for all your social networks. If you haven’t yet, read our HootSuite tutorial and try it out. One of many HootSuite’s features is the scheduler for your tweets as well as for your posts on other social networks. You need to write the tweet, select the account that should send it (if you have more than one social networks in your dashboard) and pick the date and time when the tweet should be released.

A small problem is the way you choose the time for sending; it’s possible to choose only five-minute intervals of time. So basically, you can’t schedule a tweet to be sent out at 14:23 – you’ll have to choose either 14:20 or 14:25.

SpoutSocial

SpoutSocial is another web application for managing your social networks. It has some very powerful options like grouping your profiles into groups, task management, reports etc. It also has a powerful scheduler.

With SpoutSocial you can pick any time to send a tweet and it will even suggest some times for you. It tracks when your followers are most active and suggest the time based on that so your tweets are most likely to be seen and engaged with.

BufferApp

Imagine a scenario: every morning you’re sipping your coffee reading your RSS feeds in your favorite reader. You want to share almost every article you stumble upon on, but if you do, you’ll spam your followers and won’t get the desired reach. Scheduling those tweets manually isn’t the most practical solution and you’d have to disperse your tweets throughout the day.

BufferApp makes all this far easier. You can read your feeds normally and when you find an interesting link to share, you add it in your buffer. BufferApp will then take all of your links and schedule them to go live in a time window you’ll define.

Whatever you do, care for your followers and find some good content for them. Don’t spam them, try out one of these tools to get some better tweeting experience and a master of your followers’ timeline!