The Pros and Cons of the Scheduled Tweet

September 23, 2013

Scheduled tweets are a topic of hot debate within the social media community. Apps such as Bufferapp, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite allow you to set up tweets in advance, so you can take your social media hat off and relax. Great!

Unfortunately though, as with most things, it’s not as clear-cut as it may seem. To help you decide whether or not to schedule your tweets, we’ve put together a handy list of pros and cons:

Do Schedule Tweets:

But be warned…

Don’t Schedule Tweets:

During the recent horse meat scandal, the supermarket giant Tesco scheduled a tweet telling their 47,000 followers that they were “off to hit the hay”. This post went viral, forcing Tesco to apologise on Twitter stating that “I’m terribly sorry. That tweet was scheduled before we knew of the current situation. We’d never intend to make light of it.”

N.B. Scheduling is NOT the same as an automated tweet. These are created and scheduled by a web app, which scans the web looking for particular keywords, and will then automatically share articles and websites containing those keywords. You can also use a web app to send direct messages to the inbox of every new follower, or to automatically follow everyone that follows you. Most respected twitter users will stay clear of automation. Essentially this is sophisticated spam by sharing content you haven’t read you are risking your reputation.

Related Posts

Let’s talk about your future.