Hootsuite’s tweet scheduling feature has been an amazing piece of my personal marketing strategy as well as for the brands I’ve worked with. It makes it so convenient to make sure that I am getting specific tweets out during the day, even if I am swarmed in meetings and I can customize how/when I want them to send.
But, it’s always had one downside: human choice. Is 1:10 or 1:20 better? What about 9am vs 3pm?
So, when I checked out Crowdbooster about a year ago for the first time, I was intrigued by their ‘suggested tweet time’ feature and noticed they were pretty right on with the suggested times. But, because it didn’t integrate directly with hootsuite, so over time I forgot to use the suggestions (it was a pain to go look them up every day…)
Because of that, I had gone back to the ‘schedule based on the time I saw had the best results’. Unfortunately, I still knew I was missing something and was waiting for the right tool to pop up and help.
Well, thank you Hootsuite! When I logged into my account this week, I saw this little gem pop up when I went to sent a tweet:
I turned it on and spent yesterday testing it out. Other than replies to people (timely), I scheduled every tweet that I sent. In some cases, they sent just minutes after I scheduled and some sent hours later. The big shift I noticed was an average of 3-4 more replies per tweet that I scheduled. Maybe I was just more clever yesterday…but I’m guessing it had nothing to to with me and was all about the better timing of the tweets
Of course, the geek in me automatically starting wondering what crazy algorithm was under the surface, but the social media community manager in me was just happy to have something other than me to choose the time 
The best part? Even if you click ‘auto schedule’, you can go into your scheduler dashboard and manually change the time later, if you don’t like what was selected. So for those Type-A people (of course that doesn’t include me…) you still have full control over the time of every tweet you send.
HootSuite CEO, Ryan Holmes did a great job explaining the new, totally awesome scheduler:
“It’s really quite simple – instead of our users manually selecting what time they want to schedule or post their social media messages using our Scheduling feature, they can opt to use our new AutoSchedule technology to optimize and automate the scheduling process. We want our users spending more time finding and sharing content and less time worrying about the best time of day to share it.”
Personally, I am excited to test it out some more and see if the trend of increased participation continues.
Do you schedule tweets?
If so, and you use hootsuite, what are your thoughts on the new feature?
If not…why do you choose not to schedule them?
