Scheduling Tweets - How, Why and Where?

I'm now juggling three Instagram accounts, two Twitters and two Pinterests and that's before I take on any clients through Strange Marketing. I'm working hard to become more organised, trying to make sure that some content goes out on each platform, each and every day - no easy task!

Although I've written before about automation and why I think it's killing Instagram (click here for that cheerful piece!) there are certain situations where using an automated posting platform is beneficial and can keep your content flowing smoothly allowing you to focus on other things.

It's well documented that one of the curses of the modern world is the amount of time we spend bent looking at our phones. Obviously, many of us have chosen to work in the digital space and with that comes a requirement to be connected the majority of the time. However, I can't be alone in facing that awkward 'you spend more time on your phone than anything else' conversation with relatives or friends.  It sounds pretty frivolous to explain that if you aren't there, posting content at certain times you won't gain the traction that you need to launch a project, or grow as an influencer. Automation means you gain a tiny bit of your life back, bundling the time spent tweeting into one handy segment - I do it on a Monday morning.

That's not to say that as a small business or Influencer you won't need to pop on and check reactions and reply to engagements - but it does mean that when you want to focus on your real life, your social channels are ticking along nicely, looking active and gaining interest.

In addition, automating your tweets means you aren't creating it on the fly. You aren't trying to type it out on your phone scrunched into a wet bus seat where you might not have access to all your file directories (please tell me I'm not the only ones whose iCloud hasn't updated in 134 days?) this ultimately means you have more control, as you'll have everything to hand when you create your posting schedule.

The type of content that works best is direct links to your blog or other promotional tweets, general questions to the twitter community or cross-platform promotion of your other social profiles. Here is an example of one of my recent tweets that I created through Buffer and posted out automatically to my profile at an optimum time.

By using automation in this way, I'm making sure that my blog is being promoted throughout the week. I'll add to this with tweets of my own ad hoc, but knowing that my profile is looking active, sharing my blog links and generating engagement without me having to spend the time hooked up to my mobile.

Over the week, I'll mix things up, sharing blog posts from my back catalogue that haven't got a lot of love recently as well as questions that I hope will get engagement - when I was blogging festivals during the summer, for example, I threw a few questions about favourite gigs and live music events into the schedule.

In order to answer this question, I tried out three platforms. I'll include some thoughts on each below but I think it's pretty clear which one I would recommend!

• Hootsuite - I've got a premium Hootsuite account because I plan to use it when managing my clients social media. It's a market-standard platform with a lot of useful features and the ability to review and engage with multiple social platforms through it's interface. You can schedule tweets quite simply, just type what you want to say into a box, add a link or image and then select a time that you want it to go out - their Autoschedule features will post the content at a peak time for you. You can have 30 scheduled posts per month if you are a free user. One of the great benefits if you are using Hootsuite for business is bulk uploading, you type all your updates into a spreadsheet and mass upload them to be posted at optimum times!

• Recurpost - Oh Recurpost, I had such high hopes for you! Recurpost is a scheduler that works in a different way, you create Libraries around a certain theme (so, blog posts, jokes, memes, whatever you want to share) and then for each Library you create tweets. For each tweet, you then create several variations. You add the Library into a schedule which is optimised for your timezone and Recurpost will post out your tweets and variations until your library is empty and you need to start again. Main issues for me were that it didn't post images as part of the variations, just links, and when the Libraries were empty it was a real faff taking everything off the schedule and starting again! I can see this being really useful if you want certain content going out on certain days but for me there was a lot of unnessecary messing around.

• Buffer - The dream. Super easy to work, free users can add up to ten updates to their queue at a time, you can select what times they go out or Buffer will optimise it for you. It's really easy to add images to each update and to make it even easier, if you include a link, Buffer will pull images from the site for you to select which for many of us Pinterest-optimised bloggers means not sitting around waiting for images to upload, just type in the text, copy the link, chose the image and it's a go. I wish I'd known about Buffer before paying for a premium Hootsuite membership because it's so much simpler, the interface is nice and it works like a charm.

I hope this has helped! I would love to here your reviews of platforms that perform a similiar task - I'm always looking for ways to streamline managing several social accounts and still growing on all of them.