Why You Should Never Schedule A Tweet

Posted by amabaie under Online Marketing
From http://www.unmarketing.com 4330 days ago
Made Hot by: bigmoneyweb on June 19, 2012 12:23 pm

Even if you fail to understand the "social" part of social media, there is another good reason not to schedule tweets. You might be saying something no longer valid. Here is an example of one of the worst scheduled tweets ever.

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Comments

Written by HeatherStone
4326 days ago

Hi David,

Great post and thanks for sharing but I'm gonna have to go with Anna on this one. The problem here isn't scheduled posts, it's inattentiveness. A social media person inattentive enough not to go through scheduled tweets after a disaster like this has occurred would possibly also be inattentive enough to send an inappropriate post live because they weren't paying attention to what was going on in the Twitter stream or in their own organization. That's the real problem here. No, you shouldn't schedule all your tweets. You can't if you expect to interact with others. But having points you want covered prepared ahead of time isn't anymore fake than preparing key points for a speech or preparing an outline for discussion in a meeting. The question is whether you are attentively using the tools of social media to further your goals or simply using them to escape your responsibilities and avoid being engaged.

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Written by cendrinemedia
4326 days ago

I don't really see this tweet as a huge mistake. Sometimes, you need to schedule in order to build a momentum. You just have to learn to strike a balance, in my opinion.

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Written by Stingraybiz
4326 days ago

Scheduling tweets & updates for live events is probably a bad idea. It's an even worse idea if you have multiple people handling your SM. Very little chance you catch oversights like this, definitely makes them look robotic.

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Written by Sian Phillips
4329 days ago

Oh gosh - this is an awful story - so sad that people died and were injured.

I have just got into Buffer and I'm guessing that as I won't be "buffering" events, just some blog posts about interesting stuff, that it will be ok to schedule.

I can see how scheduling something that is going live is a no no though.

Thanks for sharing on Bizsugar.com

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Written by BLASTanna
4329 days ago

While I understand agree with your comments on the importance of relevance. The same issue could happen with retweets, but that doesn't mean people should stop sharing others content (an important aspect of being "social" and building relationships online).

I also maintain the opinion that for busy professionals and those tweeting on behalf of organizations, scheduling some of the day's tweets is a must. It becomes incredibly helpful when it comes to promoting upcoming events such as webinars and trade-shows, where the details don't change without notice. It can also prove helpful in promoting ever-green blog content.

In the case of the linked article, the problem, in my opinion, wasn't scheduling the tweets, but failing to delete them when the show was cancelled.

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Written by amabaie
4329 days ago

You raise valid points. I guess the word "never" is not ideal. But the concept of social media is real-time, and I have already seen several awkward tweets - none as bad as this - because once scheduled, a busy person doesn't go back to check relevance.

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