There is a huge assortment of applications and web services to choose from when it comes to scheduling your Twitter posts. Jonathan covered five of them before, including Twuffer, SocialOomph and Hootsuite. We’ve also covered other Twitter scheduling services like StackRoll, Twitvance and BufferApp. All services do an excellent job with letting you pace out your Twitter updates and promote your blog (or yourself) without overwhelming your followers all at once.
There is one service, however, that takes the art of scheduling tweets one step further, by promising to schedule tweets for you at specific times when they will statistically have the biggest impact and reach on Twitter. The company that makes that promise is Demandforce, and the Twitter scheduling tool is called Timely.
Signing Up & Setting Up TimelyIf you just want to get your own personal tweets in front of the most people, Timely is useful, but as a blog or business marketing tool it’ll quickly earn your respect.
Demandforce is somewhat secretive about the “secret sauce†used behind the scenes to provide the largest reach for your tweets through careful timing, but according to the Timely website, each tweet is carefully posted based on when it will have the greatest impact at the optimum times.
Signing up is a breeze â€" just submit your Twitter user name and password and provide Demandforce with permission to access your Twitter account.
Once it’s in, you can get started immediately scheduling out your posts. My goal here was to put Timely to the test by adding a series of tweets to promote some of my blog updates, to see when Timely chose to “time†them for optimum exposure.
The timing was interesting â€" but I didn’t notice it as very surprising. It appeared to schedule out the three posts for the day almost exactly six hours apart.
About 24 hours later, I logged back into Timely and scheduled my three more posts for the day â€" I noticed that the times did in fact change slightly.  The first post was a bit later, the second a little earlier, and the last a bit earlier as well.
It did seem that Timely was carefully adjusting the scheduled post times based on the follower responses and other analytics data from the day before. I can’t prove this, but based on this first round of tests with Timely, that seemed to be the case.
I also noticed a surprising bump in my reader response to blog posts after the Timely tweets went out. In one case one blog entry received nearly 50% more comments than some of my more commented post entries in just the first few hours after the Timely tweet went out.
This was exciting, but this early on it’s hard to say whether or not it was just a fluke â€" a controversial topic that created a higher reader response. However, the other posts for the day also had more comments than usual, so it did appear that using Timely made a difference as to the visibility of those tweets.
In fact, you can see those analytics if you click on the “Performance†tab inside Timely. At the right of each published tweet, you’ll see the number of clicks that tweet had from other Twitter users, the number of “reactions†in the form of retweets, and the total reach of the tweet in terms of Twitter users. Three tweets for the day saw a better reach than I usually get from my standard “manual†tweeting schedule, as far as I could tell.
As each tweet gets posted, you will get the analytics data for each tweet listed on your Timely user page broken down by post. This is useful information to see which tweets were more popular in terms of clicks, reactions and overall reach.
You can also reply to individual user comments from right inside Timely, which is a useful feature, since you don’t even have to log into Twitter to have a dialogue with your readers or customers.
When you click on “Settings†inside your Timely account, you can configure whether your account schedules Twitter posts on weekends, how many Twitter posts to schedule each day, and you can even invite additional Twitter users (or email accounts) to log into Timely and help you out with scheduling Twitter posts for the account.
Even though there are so many services out there to schedule out Twitter posts, Timely goes one step beyond the rest by making intelligent use of analytics data from your past posts. By analyzing and “learning†from the past response to your previous tweets, Timely takes care of scheduling out your posts at at the best time.
The “best†time is defined by Timely not with guesses, but by using hard evidence from past performance. After a while, Timely will know exactly when your tweets do best, and it’ll schedule those tweets out for you, leaving you to think more about the things that require your full attention.
So, give Timely a shot and let us know how it works for you. Does it increase your “reach†and your reader response? Provide your opinion in the comments section below.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Tagged: schedule • social media • twitter tips
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