TweetLater, the tweet-scheduling Twitter service that also brought users the ability to auto-follow and auto-welcome new followers, has released two new features this week in an attempt to help users better manage their accounts.

Keyword Monitoring Made Easy

Though keyword tracking via IM was one of Twitter’s most popular features back when it was available, there haven’t been many good solutions for staying on top of microblogging keyword searches lately, unless you’re pulling RSS feeds based on Twitter Search queries. Dewald Pretorius, creator of TweetLater, decided that he’s tired of waiting for track to come back to Twitter and has developed his own version of the service as an added feature inside TweetLater.

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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.

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