For years, I have been using Tweetdeck to schedule tweets. Yesterday I suddenly wondered why I couldn’t just schedule tweets from an app on my mobile. So I searched and found this Mashable article recommending 3 free tools (it called them apps so I thought they were mobile apps, but they’re actually web-based) and I thought they worked better than Tweetdeck for some things but worse for others.
I schedule tweets for the following purposes:
To pre-tweet questions or notes during a conference presentation so I don’t have to actually do it while I am presenting (even I can’t multitask that well).
To tweet out announcements at different times of the day (e.g. for an upcoming event or, less often, a recently published article I want to promote).
To help ensure a Twitter chat moves on, sometimes I schedule the questions ahead of time so I can just focus on the conversation itself.
Tweetdeck
The advantage of Tweetdeck is I can be logged onto multiple accounts at the same time and schedule a tweet to go from several of them at the same time. Because Tweetdeck belongs to Twitter, it has features like guessing ahead Twitter handles of people you follow, which can save a lot of time. However, the interface for scheduling tweets is a bit clunky and sometimes doesn’t work perfectly for me. Tweetdeck also allows you to insert an image on a Tweet for example. The main problem with Tweetdeck, though, is that it’s sometimes confused about Egypt’s timezone (it’s hit and miss for all of the internet, really, and a long story as to why). Long story short - Tweetdeck’s interface is really clunky on mobile and on my Android I can’t even see the Tweet as I write it (scheduled or not).
Future Tweets
I used Future Tweets mainly because it had an option for me to choose my timezone. I was planning to schedule tweets on a Pacific timezone and so I just posted the tweets on Pacific time. It was really clever about it too, because it was showing me an analog clock showing what time it was on my phone (locally) even while allowing me to schedule on Pacific time. It also has this really cool (but ultimately useless) feature that allows you to Tweet upside down! I played with it a big yesterday and discovered it loses some text while doing that...so...not so great. It also wouldn’t (for obvious reasons) guess-ahead Twitter handles when you add them. But because Future Tweets isn’t part of Twitter, it seems they recently had a service outage when Twitter updated their APIs without informing them (ouch). It also seems they used to have a recurrence option that Twitter asked them to revoke (thank God for that! Imagine the amount of spam! Tweetdeck automatically prevents you from repeating the exact same tweet twice which can get annoying but is understandable given spam).
For the record.. Future Tweets got Cairo timezone right when I scheduled a test tweet. Future Tweets also has a really cool interface for tweets you have scheduled so far, that allows you to edit after you saved and to see clearly when each tweet is scheduled and whether it was delivered. Unlike Tweetdeck which only shows the Tweets yet-to-be-tweeted (if you add a column for it), FutureTweets continues to show ones that have been delivered. Useful! Also, unlike the other two tools I am reviewing, the interface is by default text-based not calendar based. My phone doesn’t have a huge screen so I prefer the text-based date/time.
Twuffer
I didn’t fall in love with Twuffer. It appear to be similar to Future Tweets, but it gets the Egypt timezone wrong, and more importantly, it doesn’t allow you to easily edit a scheduled tweet after you’ve scheduled it. Which can be a disaster. It shows you sent and failed tweets in a tab (not a great interface) but the no-editing/deletion is a deal-breaker for me. It also can’t schedule upside down Tweets :)
So basically - I would use Tweetdeck if I am on a computer and want to schedule from multiple accounts, tag many people whose Twitter handles I don’t know, or add images. I would use Future Tweets if on mobile, want to schedule on a different timezone, or want to post an upside down Tweet. Though, honestly, with its clean interface I would use it almost all the time instead of the clunkier Tweetdeck interface and leave Tweetdeck for other purposes.
I know there are a few apps (Hootsuite and Buffer) I could try, but I don’t have enough free space on my phone to keep downloading apps for a Prof Hacker review...but if you have tried and liked them, please tell us in the comments
Other people may use Tweet scheduling for other reasons. When do you schedule tweets and which tool(s) do you prefer?
[Featured image via wikimedia commons under CC-BY-SA license]