Scheduling Your Social Media? (Part 2)

Yesterday I talked about blogs.

Today, Twitter.

The subject is the controversial topic of Scheduling and Automating.

There is a difference between the two on Twitter.

First I’ll tackle the Automating.

Generally speaking I am against most of it.

Automated tweets are most annoying when people set up their Twitter accounts to send me a Direct Message automatically.

However there are some instances of Automated Tweeting that are ok in my book. They rate a 5 on my 10 point scale.

That’s the Paper.li type of accounts, or Feedblitz which you can use to send out a newsletter and tweets of your blog posts.

 

On the subject of Scheduling tweets, first let me quote Ricky Potts and a couple of tweets he sent me last week when we were talking about this:

“… I am passionate about this stuff. I truly believe there is a right and a wrong way to do social….NOTHING should be scheduled or automated. It should come from you, when you want to say it… no ways around that IMO…Scheduling tweets does not offer value to your audience. You shouldn’t write for you, you should write for your audience. ”

Now I am also passionate about this stuff but my approach is different.

A lot of people schedule tweets to appear when they are not really on Twitter. The problem with this that Ricky is referring to is that it is broadcasting and not interacting with their followers.

My reasons for scheduling tweets is actually quite different, as I doing most of my tweeting from my laptop, not my phone. And if someone does respond to a scheduled tweet, I will respond from with my phone or laptop which ever is most convenient.

So why do I schedule some of my tweets?

To space out the various tweets that I send out so I don’t clog up my followers twitter stream is one reason.

Another is the promotional tweets that I mentioned here.

Your thoughts are always welcome.