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On Sat­ur­day I talked about tools that help man­age your Twit­ter account. Hoot­suite is a very pop­u­lar pro­gram that a lot of peo­ple and busi­nesses use. One rea­son com­pa­nies like to use it is because you can cre­ate sched­uled tweets. This means you can write up a tweet and tell Hoot­suite to send it out on what­ever day you’d like. This is very appeal­ing to that small busi­ness owner who doesn’t have time to “do it all”.  They can sched­ule their tweets for the week and be done. Right?

Wrong!

Remem­ber, Twit­ter was designed to be a suc­cess­ful SOCIAL media tool. This means to use the tool suc­cess­fully you need to be social: engage ‚engage, engage!

Now, that being said, I’m going to endorse sched­uled tweets also. On this site, I use a plu­gin called Twitoaster. This plu­gin will send out an auto­mated tweet every time I pub­lish a post. I’ve even sched­uled tweets through Hoot­suite, myself. They were spread out to make sure I noti­fied my fol­low­ers of some­thing I was work­ing on through­out the day. Not every­one is on Twit­ter morn­ing, noon, and night (…ahem…). So if I want my fol­low­ers to be aware of some­thing impor­tant, I will make sure a tweet is sent out at var­i­ous times.

The key to mak­ing auto­mated tweets suc­cess­ful is to make sure you’re avail­able to fol­low up with any­one that is try­ing to chat with you about your tweets. It’s pretty anti-social to send out a tweet and not be there to answer any ques­tions about this.

So if send­ing out auto­mated tweets will help you stay on top of your social media pres­ence, then by all means do it…but just don’t use Twit­ter as big bill­board in the sky to pro­mote your­self for free. Your social media expe­ri­ence will leave you bang­ing your head against the wall.

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Be sure to check out the other blog­gers of 31 Days of Min­istry Online:

Karin — 31 Days of Inten­tional Par­ent­ing