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Scheduling your Tweets can be an efficient way to maintain and grow your Twitter presence without devoting a chunk of time out of every day to creating new content. But there’s more to being successful with scheduling your Tweets than just writing a bunch of posts in advance, scheduling them to publish, and forgetting about them. If you want to have success with this tactic, you need to follow these important tips.

1. Schedule Tweets based on evergreen content—When you schedule your Tweets in advance, you have to make sure they’ll still be relevant and useful by the time they go live. That’s why it’s a good idea to only schedule evergreen content—content that is always relevant and helpful. Examples of good evergreen content include famous quotes related to your niche, tried and true tips, and links to popular posts from your blog archive.
2. Space them out accordingly—When I schedule my Tweets (admittedly, I’ve been slacking lately), I like to space them out so that a few of them publish at various times throughout the day. This ensures that I hit followers with new posts at different times, helping me reach more people than if I scheduled them all to post at the same time. It also looks more natural this way.
3. Monitor responses to your scheduled Tweets—Make sure you pay attention to any responses or ReTweets that you might receive to your scheduled posts. I have my Twitter setup to shoot me an email anytime someone replies to me, ensuring I’m always in the loop and can quickly jump in the conversation.
4. Take time to interact with followers on a regular basis—Twitter (and all social media) is all about interaction. You can’t just set a bunch of posts to publish and walk away. You still need to put in the time to interact with your followers and build relationships. This means setting aside time to occasionally reply to interesting Tweets, do some ReTweeting, and engage your followers in other ways.
5. Mix in fresh, relevant Tweets, too—Show your followers that you’re always up to date by mixing in fresh, relevant Tweets, such as links to new stories, thoughts on current events, and live Tweets about the things you’re doing right now. This provides a good balance of content, keeping you relevant.

Do you schedule your Tweets? Why or why not?

I recently wrote a post detailing the reasons I like to schedule my Tweets. I understand that it’s a topic that many people disagree over. I’ve talked to people who tell me that scheduling Tweets is a terrible idea, and I’ve also spoken with others who share my belief that there are many benefits to scheduling Tweets in advance.

In the interest of presenting both sides of the debate, I’m going to present the case against scheduling your Tweets. I encourage you to add your opinion to this debate by leaving a comment after you’ve read this post.

So, what are some of the potential drawbacks of scheduling your Tweets?

• It could remove the social element—The whole point of Twitter is to interact with other people. If all of your Tweets are written in advance and scheduled, you risk losing the social element that makes Twitter so popular. That’s why I don’t rely only on scheduled Tweets. I still stay active on Twitter to take part in real-time conversations.
• You may get behind the times—Think about this. You write a Tweet today that’s not scheduled to go out for another few weeks. What if things change between now and then? What if that Tweet suddenly becomes outdated or even inaccurate? Or what if the conversation in your industry has simply shifted to a new topic but you’re still discussing the last trend? You don’t want to get behind the times when you schedule your Tweets.
• Breaking news could make scheduled Tweets irrelevant or awkward—This blog post tells the story of Twitter users whose scheduled Tweets were popping up at the exact same time news was breaking of Osama Bin Laden’s death. The pre-written Tweets came across as irrelevant, very awkward, and even insensitive given the major news that had just broken. That’s always a risk you’ll run into when scheduling your Tweets.

Are there any other reasons you can think of to not schedule Tweets? Share them with us by leaving a comment below.