I was driving to office, when I got a call from my friend. I told him I was driving and would call him back once I reached office. He seemed surprised. He had just seen a tweet from me wishing him on his birthday. How could I be driving? I told him I was using a tweet scheduling service. I had scheduled a tweet to him at 11 am (as I knew he woke up only at 10.30).
Tweet scheduling services are not new. Some of them even allow you to schedule Faceboook posts.
Why do you need these services? There are people like me who feel as if they are marooned somewhere in the middle of an ocean if they don't have access to Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. It is not enough if they consume news. They have to say something to their friends. But there are times when it is just not possible to tweet or post, like when they are sleeping, or driving.
Here's where apps like Timely, Buffer and Future Tweet help.
Timely is slightly different. It ‘finds' when your tweets have the most impact and spreads your tweets during that period. For instance, if your tweets have the most impact between 11 am and 5 p.m., all your tweets posted through Timely will be spread out during the period.
Twitter clients such as Hootsuite also have the scheduling functionality, though not exactly like Timely. They just let you schedule your tweets at the times you want.
If you have an Android phone, you can use apps like Buffer quite creatively. Apart from adding tweets, you can even add retweets to your buffer through the share icon in the Twitter app.
If you are wondering whether such scheduling apps are really useful, as I said, they can be used quite creatively. You may want to remind your friend about something in the evening through Twitter. You can just schedule a tweet mentioning your friend at the specific time in the evening. Even if you forget, the apps won't.
Or you may have lots of things to tweet to the world, but sending them at one go may irritate your followers. You can write all your tweets and schedule them whenever you want.
If you are one of those who wake up early, there is no point tweeting at 5 am when most of your friends would be asleep. Many of them may start checking for tweets only after breakfast. If you use these services, you need not wait for your friends to be ready to receive your tweets. Just write your tweets and schedule them. That's it.
@dinakaran