Streamlining the process of scheduling your tweets is a powerful strategy that can propel the growth of your audience. Twitter scheduling makes it more convenient to share more stories and reach readers outside your time zone. Moreover, scheduling your tweets gives you the freedom to get back to doing more important things with your time —try writing more stories and taking more breaks during your busy workday.
This simple social media marketing strategy enables writers, entrepreneurs, and influencers to reach and engage a larger audience without spending all of their time managing their account. It’s worked very well for me over the last few years as I used it to grow a publication from 0 to more than 58,000 subscribers, so I wanted to share why and how you might want to give it a try.
Benefits of Scheduling Tweets
You may have other social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., that you need to actively manage. Manually crafting and publishing content from all of these accounts is not the best use of your time because you have to stop what you are doing just to publish a tweet, then a Facebook and Instagram post, and on until you find yourself quickly switching from a creator to a consumer.
Furthermore, Science Direct notes that switching between work activities greatly affects productivity and work performance. It takes a significant amount of time to fully transition from the previous task to the new task — time that you could use more valuably. By scheduling your tweets, you can focus mainly on writing your stories. Once you have your stories, you can easily use Signal to schedule your tweets and never think about them again. With your tweet scheduled on a repeating basis, you can completely disengage and move on to your next activity without ever visiting Twitter, where’d you get distracted by your feed.
2. Scheduling your tweets ensures quality and consistency.
When you schedule your tweets, you are setting a plan for how you will distribute your stories to your readers. When you plan, you get to leverage the best strategies for the ideal amount of tweets per day, and when and how often you should tweet. You give yourself the opportunity to analyze your content before tweeting to ensure the quality and consistency of your message; if you step away and realize your tweet could be better, you’d have enough time to go back and make necessary edits.
3. Scheduling your tweets helps you reach a wider audience
Tweet scheduling can also help in reaching more people who live in different time zones from yourself and your main audience. By scheduling your tweets for different times of the day around the clock, you can share your stories beyond your work hours to achieve greater engagement and maximize traffic to your stories.
How to Schedule Tweets
There are two ways to schedule your tweets. You can schedule tweets within your Twitter Ads Account or use a more streamlined and cost effective service like Signal by Penname, a content distribution and discovery platform for writers and readers. To use the Twitter Ads, you need to set a daily budget for your ads, and you’ll need to spend at least $30/day to consistently reach your audience throughout the day. On the other hand, Signal is offered for $7/ month while extending the lifespan of your tweets beyond the usual one time send.
Scheduling Tweets on Twitter Ads Account (💸 not free):
Let’s walk through the steps to schedule a tweet on Twitter Ads, if you can afford it. It’s not as simple as scheduling your tweets on Signal, but it’s worth knowing it’s an option available to you.
Start by logging into ads.twitter.com and navigate to the “Creatives” in the “Tweets” tab. On the top right corner of the page, click the “New Tweet” button. You will then be redirected to the Tweet Composer, where you can create your tweet. You can add your tweet copy, images, videos, and cards from here. You have the ability to choose to make your tweet “Promoted-only”, which will cause your tweet to only be delivered to users if they are targeted in one of your campaigns instead of being delivered to your existing followers. Uncheck this box in order to schedule an organic Tweet.
If you’ve made it this far, there’s only a few more steps to finally schedule your tweet. Select the down arrow button next to “Tweet”. Choose “Schedule” from that drop-down menu. Next, select the date and time you want your scheduled tweet to go live. When that time comes, your tweet will be published to your account.
Phew! You made it. The bad news is you had to go through that. The good news is there’s a much better and faster way. If you still have enough energy to keep going, follow me to the promise land.
Scheduling Tweets on Signal
Signal allows you to schedule your stories and share to your Twitter audience one time or on a repeated schedule of your choice; you can use your own tweet or the specially crafted tweet that Signal suggests for your story. Signal enables you to spend more of your time doing important work or taking more breaks while it helps you reach your audience and drive increased engagement with your tweets.
From creating to sending, Signal is an extremely streamlined system. You can schedule a signal with just three clicks if you’d like. Let me walk you through the process of creating a signal.
1. Navigate to PenSignal.com. Once you’re logged in, click “Schedule a signal post”. If you don’t have your Twitter account connected yet, you will need to connect it before proceeding.
- 2. Once you’re all connected and ready to schedule your first signal, just follow these three simple steps as displayed in this 20 second gif — copy your story’s link, paste it in the form, and click the “Schedule” butto
3. Enter the link (URL) to one of your stories and Signal will suggest an appropriate tweet with the right hashtags (from the tags or keywords on your article). Note that your tweet should have the article link in it just as it would be if you were composing the tweet on Twitter. At the time of this writing, a link takes up 24 characters of a tweet.
- 4. At that point, your signal is pretty much ready to be scheduled. However, you can continue to the bottom of the form to edit the schedule for the signal. By default, your signal is set to be sent out every 12 hours. You can edit this as you wish. You can have it send out once, every three weeks, every five months, or however often you’d like between three hours and 12 months. If you’d like, you can even have it switch up the schedule after a certain number of tweet
5. Once scheduled, it will display in your list of signals like thi
Signal will tweet out your signal on the schedule you chose in the form. Once it has been sent out for the first time, you will see a “Last sent out …” message in your dashboard. The next time it’ll be sent out is displayed as “Next signal at …”.
Notice that there is an option to “Tweet now”. That gives you the ability to force the signal to be sent via Twitter whenever you’d like as often as you’d like. This is a good way to store tweets for later and send them when you’re ready.
Tips for Effectively Scheduling Tweets
Location
Plan and choose between a local or a global audience ahead so that you can schedule your tweets consistent with your target time zones and engagement habits of your target audiences.
Audience
Create a reader persona which allows you to promote your marketing in a more specific and effective way. Think of the habits of your audience: are they the type of readers who are busy on weekends or are they at busy in their office during a given time of the weekday.
Twitter Analytics
There is an abundance of great insights that can be found when you leverage Twitter Analytics. You could get more ideas about tweet timing and what type of content yields the greatest engagement from people in your audience.
Peak Times
Schedule your tweets at the most optimal times and you’ll see a definitive increase in engagement from your target audience. Here’s a good case study on good times to tweet as of 2018.
Conclusion
As a writer, you are busy enough creating content for your readers. Scheduling your tweets makes it easier for you to share your articles on the schedules that works best for you and your readers. By using Signal to schedule your tweets on repeat, you give your stories much higher chances at reaching your target audience. The more stories that you schedule for tweets through Signal, more likely you’ll reach the right readers who will increasingly engage with your work.
It’s never been so easy to distribute your stories on Twitter without spending hours every week writing up and sending tweets. It’s never made more sense than now to do so. You have more important things to do than managing your Twitter profile; automate the tweets and get back to work.
