Last week Mark covered Twuffer, a new player to the tweet-scheduling arena, but today I’ll be talking about someone who has been solving this problem for Twitter users for several months now.
Dewald Pretorious, the man behind TweetLater, bills the service as a way to keep your Twitter stream ticking with new tweets while you are busy doing other things. If you can’t afford to spend all day sitting on Twitter (as some people seem to do), using a scheduling service to space out your tweets throughout the day is a great way to keep things going. Scheduling your tweets ahead of time may not be the best way to carry on conversations, but it will work for sharing links to interesting articles or posting reminders.
Schedule Up to 12 Tweets Per Hour, But No Replies or DMs
TweetLater allows you to schedule a maximum of 12 tweets for any rolling 60 minute window (one tweet per five minutes is very fair, considering some power users are even more liberal than that). Dewald also makes it clear that his service can’t be used to send replies or direct messages, which he believes could otherwise lead to potential abuse by spammers.
If you also run a blog outside of your microblogging activities, TweetLater works great for scheduling out those “new blog post” updates at the most opportune time, especially if you are not available at that time to tweet it directly.
Auto-Welcome, Auto-Respond and Auto-Follow - A Whole Lot of Autos
If you’re considering scheduling some of your tweets, time is probably a very important resource to you. Three other ways TweetLater does a great job of helping manage the time you spend with your account revolves around microblogging automation. Simply by clicking a few checkboxes and forwarding a copy of your “new follower” Twitter emails, TweetLater can welcome new followers with an @reply digest, automatically follow users who start following you and send private welcome messages to followers via DM.
Auto-following and auto-welcoming have each been hot topics in the blogosphere, but I believe each function can have its place if used the right way. We’ve been auto-following users with our Microblink Twitter account (@microblink) because each of us also has our own accounts to manage, and constantly checking in between usernames can be quite time-consuming. Using this small bit of automation makes thing much easier to manage. Also, with new followers automatically being followed, we are always welcomed with new tweets in our stream when we log in.
If you’re after a tweet-scheduling service, there are several on the market, but TweetLater does a great job. And if you’re after any sort of microblogging automation, TweetLater definitely has that in the bag.
Accounts to Follow
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.
Another player in this market is Sendible.com, which has also been around for a few months now. It lets you schedule status updates to Twitter as well as other Social Networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin and Plurk.
Martin,
Thanks for the information. We’ll definitely have to take a look at Sendible in the near future.
Martin, The “and many more” link actually sends me to the sign up page, however it is great to see that Sendible is supporting at least one other microblog. Do you work for Sendible? If so would you be open to an interview? Send us an email through our contact page if interested. Thanks!
Guys - thanks for recommending this service. I’m not using the scheduling tweets method - just the auto-reply on follow. It’s working great!
Andy,
Glad we could help you find the tools you need. Let us know if we can be of service in the future. It feels good to be a go-to source for microblogging.