Schedule your Tweets on Twitter for Maximum Engagement and Reach

Tweeting at the right time can help you reach and engage with more and more followers. Yes, you read it right.

However, as a social media manager, you might not get the time to wait around and tweet around a specific time every day. Here’s where scheduling tweets come into existence.  

Let’s have a look on the reasons why you should schedule tweets, how to do that and what are the things that you should keep in mind while scheduling tweets.  

Why schedule tweets 

 If you haven’t scheduled tweets before and this is your first time, you might be thinking, “What is the need of scheduling tweets when it can be done normally?” Well, here are few reasons.

• Keeps you productive 

One of the major benefits of scheduling tweets is it keeps you productive. Just think how many times in a day do you tweet. Let's imagine you tweet up to 14 times in a day! Along with Twitter, we also post the same on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and other social media channels. Imagine writing and publishing every tweet just when we want to. We must stop whatever we are doing in the middle to tweet. 

During a nine-hour day, we will be “interrupted” for every half an hour to tweet! 

It has been proved that such interruptions affect one’s productivity as well as quality of work. Each time we switch between tasks, it takes about 10 to 20 minutes to disengage our mind from the previous task and concentrate on the new task! By scheduling the tweets, you can focus on only one thing, thus increasing your productivity as well as quality of the content.  

• Ensure consistency and quality 

Apart from improving your productivity, another benefit of scheduling tweets is to ensure quality of your tweets and at the same time to give a consistence performance on Twitter. 

Scheduling tweets is necessarily planning ahead.  

If you plan your work in advance, you can stick to your social media strategy and follow it in the right way. For instance, you can plan and schedule all the tweets for the whole week every Monday. Even by writing the content beforehand, you can create better content and increase your productivity, as mentioned earlier.  

 Scheduling tweets plays a great role if you are planning to launch an upcoming campaign on Twitter. While you are planning your promotion, you can easily create and schedule all the tweets in advance. On the final day of launch, you don’t have to worry about your social media posts and promotions. The tweets scheduled by you will be tweeted automatically at your chosen schedule.  

• Reach a wide audience 

If your business has a regional or an international audience, you can reach out to more people at different time zones by tweeting at different times in a day. Even if you are a local business, your audience might be checking Twitter multiple times in a day rather than during the working hours only. So, you can either be on standby at those times for publishing your tweets or you can schedule them and relax! 

 There is even more. As you can schedule tweet at various times with a minimum effort, you can experiment with multiple posting time to find the best time to tweet. 

If you are convinced by the benefits of scheduling your tweets, let's see how you can schedule your tweets and enjoy the above-mentioned benefits.  

How to schedule tweets 

There are various social media management tools that can be used to schedule posts on different social networks. One among them is TweetDeck. It is owned by Twitter and provides users a different interface to organize and follow their interactions.  

If, for any reason you are not available for posting an update manually at a specific time, or if you are planning to spread your updates over the course of the day, you can simply schedule your posts beforehand automatically, whenever you want your audience to see it. 

To begin, go to your browser and navigate to tweetdeck.com. Sign in using your Twitter account’s username and password.  

Once logged in, you will be welcomed to TweetDeck. The best part of TweetDeck is it organizes different parts of one’s Twitter experience into various columns so that everything is visible at a glance.  

To write your tweet, you need to click the "Tweet Composer". You will find the Tweet Composer button on the left corner of your screen. Its blue in colour and has a feather icon. On clicking the icon, tweet composer will be opened. 

Type your tweet with relevant hashtags, but make sure it is not more than 280 characters. You can also add an optional image by clicking “Add images” below the composer. If you want, you can provide long links in your tweet. No worries, TweetDeck will automatically shorten it.  

Now comes the main part, i.e. "scheduling the tweet." To do so, click the “Schedule tweet” button present under the tweet composer. On click, the button will open a calendar with the time. Click on the date and time when you want to schedule your post. When you have selected everything, click the “Tweet at {date/ time}” button. Your tweet will be scheduled automatically. A checkmark will appear to confirm your scheduling.   

If needed, you can delete, edit or reschedule the scheduled tweet too.  Click the “Edit” or “Delete” button in the scheduled column. The best thing about TweetDeck is you can schedule as many tweets as you want. It is the best solution for those who want to do social media promotions for their brand, but don’t have enough time.