This is the second post in a series called “Twitter Series: Your Questions Answered” where I will take up ONE question each day for a week and answer it in the form of a blog post! Hoping it will be useful for newbies on twitter Today’s question is:

Should you schedule your tweets?

This can be a debatable topic. I was initially against tweet scheduling because I believed in tweeting in real time, always. Then one day, I thought of trying out scheduled tweets (using hootsuite). And I must say, there are more positives to it than negatives.

Let’s look at the positives:

1. Your Klout score increases: Klout measures your influence on the basis of  Network influence, True reach and Amplification probability. Scheduled tweets can help you increase your retweets and response, hence increasing your amplification probability, thus in turn growing your Klout score.
2. You can tweet in another timezone: Yes, we have followers, but do we interact with most of them? Not really, because of timezones! I’ve noticed that when I scheduled tweets, I’ve received retweets from people who I never really interacted with. Your reach expands because of scheduling tweets.
3. Space out tweets throughout the day(or night): Look for the time when you observe that more people are online on twitter. If you tweet at peak time – you’ll get more retweets and thus your twitter audience grows. Since I’m from India, my ‘day’ is ‘night’ for United States and vice versa. Hence I schedule tweets at night! Similarly, you can schedule tweets according to whatever time suits you.
4. When you really come online you can just interact with people:  I have never been able to really engage with people who tweet from 2am to 6am due to the time difference. They just remain as “followers” and don’t become “friends”. Hence when they respond to my scheduled tweets, I can easily reply to them when I’m live tweeting and  engage with them better.

But, schedule tweets – the right way:

1. Don’t fully automate: Don’t schedule everything you tweet. Schedule a bit, then live tweet as well. Don’t be a tweet machine – there must be “humanness” in your tweets too.
2. Keep sufficient gaps between two consecutive tweets: Set the timings of the scheduled tweets such that they are apart by at least 30 minutes (according to me) because you might not want to annoy your followers by filling up their timelines with only your tweets. Or just use Bufferapp which does it for you.

Scheduling tweets takes your time. You have to keep looking for good content and schedule your tweets.  Sometimes, I don’t schedule tweets because I’ve been too lazy or because of lack of time. It’s not necessary to schedule tweets everyday, though!

This is my opinion of scheduled tweets. There are both – positives and negatives. What do you prefer? Do you schedule tweets or not? Let me know in the comments!