These days it is impossible to disregard the importance of Twitter as a tool for business communication, but figuring out how best to manage it using the myriad of tools that are available is almost a full time job in itself!
There are two ways in which I use Twitter for business. One is to notify our followers of our latest blog posts and the other is to communicate on a more personal level with our community. I achieve the first goal via a service which delivers blog content from our RSS feed. The second is something that I have always done manually. I’m talking things like tweeting about forum competitions or asking people what they are working on at the moment. Community notices, generally – with the occasional tweet designed to whip up a frenzy. That’s the fun side of community management.
There are plenty of services out there which allow you to schedule tweets in advance, and I have used plenty of them in the past. But I didn’t fall in love with any of them like I did with Timely. To be fair, I’ve always been a girl that falls in love easily, but I’m fairly sure that Timely is going to look pretty attractive to lots of you. What caught my eye was it’s point of difference. Timely analyzes your past 200 odd tweets and figures out the best time slots in which to publish your scheduled tweets to get the best possible coverage. For a kiwi girl like me who tends to tweet when most of our audience is asleep, this is a marriage made in heaven!
And if you need proof, the numbers say it all. There is a Performance tab which tells you how many clicks and re-tweets each tweet gets, as well as it’s reach. @sitepointdotcom has 68,440 followers, and thanks to Timely, we have regular tweets which are getting in excess of 82,000 views. Can’t complain about that…
Stats aside, the service is easy to use and it’s free. I’m giving it the big thumbs up.
Formerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.