How To Schedule Tweets Natively In Twitter

On Monday, Twitter announced a new feature for ad-buying users: native tweet scheduling, and community managers everywhere rejoiced. Other social media channels, like Facebook, have allowed native scheduling for a while now. It seems that Twitter is eager to catch up as it approaches its IPO date.

Native Tweet Scheduling and Why It’s Awesome

There are a lot of free third party publishing tools out there like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and others that let you schedule tweets. Many of these, however, do not have direct access to Twitter cards or the Twitter photo tools. Some of them don’t even have the server space to hold your photos at all. If you’re publishing with a photo, the best way seems to have always been through Twitter native. Now you can schedule that way, too.

How To Schedule a Tweet

The word “native” is a little misleading because it’s not exactly native for most community managers. Scheduled posts have to be created through Twitter’s ads manager, though it is important to note that it isn’t necessary to put money behind a scheduled tweet. The login credentials are the same, but in order to schedule a post you’ll have to point your browser to ads.twitter.com.

Once you’re there and logged on, check the top tabs and hover over Creatives and click Tweets.

Schedule Tweets on Twitter

You’ll then notice a friendly blue button in the right hand corner that says “Compose Tweet.” Click that, and it will take you to the new tweet dialogue. There are three sub-tabs in this dialogue box. In the first one you can choose to create a standard tweet to all followers, or a promoted one to a select group (if you want to put money behind it). The second tab lets you pick the promotion campaign if applicable, and the third is where you can schedule the tweet.

Native Tweet Scheduling

As of now, it seems that the only time zone you can work in to schedule tweets is PST, so keep that in mind if you’re operating in a different time zone and adjust accordingly. You can schedule tweets up to a year in the future, and you can be pretty specific-to-the-minute with the time of your tweet.

Another nice feature here is the ability to attach Twitter cards if you have them created.

Really, it’s as simple as that. Do you think this will change the way you tweet? Let us know in the comments below.



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