How To Schedule Tweets For Your WordPress Blog Posts

The Internet sees a constant bombardment of blog posts every day. With so much to read and consume, your posts can get lost in the chatter. Blog posts can get overshadowed by the news or the next big thing that’s ‘it’ for the moment. When this happens, your post can get brushed under the carpet to never be read again.

Social media is a great way to inform your readers and followers of your blog updates. One of the favorites, and most effective, is Twitter. Rather than just tweeting at any time you want, it is best to send out your tweets at optimal times. Since it’s difficult to be at your computer during all of those optimal times, it’s a good idea to tweet all throughout the day to make sure you hit them all. This will make your tweets more visible and will help you get more traffic. But that can take up a lot of time and it’s not always possible to be at your computer when you need to send a tweet.

To solve that problem it’s best to schedule your posts. Scheduling your tweets will give you more time to do other things, but even taking the time to schedule all of your social networks can get overwhelming. How do we fix it? By using a scheduling tool. A good scheduling tool will save you time and improve your workflow. It will even improve your traffic by tweeting your old posts on your behalf. Let’s look at a few of these tools.

Services

Services are apps that work in your browser, from your desktop, or your mobile device, that connect you with many social media networks from a single dashboard. They allow you to schedule your posts, virtually any way you want, with ease. Let’s start with one of my favorites.

Buffer

Buffer is all about social media management. Buffer is a great tool for saving time with your social media marketing. It helps you manage multiple social media accounts at once. You can write up a bunch of posts and choose which social media network each post should be shared on. It will then send them out to those networks throughout the day, giving you an ongoing social media presence even when you’re not online.

It allows you to schedule your content from anywhere on the web. It will shorten your links and give you statistics on your posts’ performance. You can let Buffer handle the timing if you want or you can schedule them yourself. You can also pause your posts if you want to. You can even post through email. You can also post images to Twitter. It’s multi-user so you can collaborate with team members. It has a dashboard that’s easy to use. You just upload your content to Buffer and it handles the sharing between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

There are three plans available for Buffer: the Individual Plan, the Awesome Plan, and the Business Plan.

The Individual Plan is free and allows you to connect one profile for each social media account. You can store up to 10 posts for each network at a time. You can schedule days and times. The schedule is limited so that you can’t set different times for different days.

The Awesome Plan is $102 per year and lets you connect 10 profiles for each social media network. You can store up to 100 posts for each network. You can schedule varied times and days. You’re not limited in any way. You can have 15 RSS feeds for each profile.

The Business Plan is $50 per month for 25 accounts and 5 team members, $100 per month for 50 accounts and 10 team members, and $250 per month for 150 accounts and 25 team members. The business plan adds analytics. You can set your own UTM parameters to track. You can track the growth of your followers and analyze that growth based on your posting schedules and content engagement. You can analyze statistics by date, by campaign, retweets, clicks, and more. Plus, you can compare the data together (retweets vs clicks, etc.), export your analytics, and sort based on engagement.

There are a lot of features to help you analyze your performance. You can use this data to increase your traffic and the effectiveness of your social media strategies.

TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is a free custom interface from Twitter that’s great for tracking, organizing, and engaging with your audience. It has a lot of features that work from a single dashboard. You can build and organize custom timelines, and keep track of lists, searches, and activity. You can organize your screen with multiple timelines. It’s a very simple way of keeping your Twitter account organized.

It’s a great tool for scheduling your tweets. You can schedule them to go out at any time of any day. You can also add images and send direct messages.

There are lots of searching filters that allow you to keep track of topics, events, and hashtags. You can tweet, monitor multiple timelines, or follow accounts from a single account or multiple accounts.

It’s free and it’s available for multiple platforms as an app and you can use it in a web browser.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is powerful service for improving your workflow and gaining traffic to your site. Hootsuite is an online platform that allows you to interact with all of your social media accounts from a single dashboard. It saves you time and improves your workflow in many ways.

You can manage multiple social networks at once, you can reply to messages, mentions, and comments with a single click, you can save and send archived responses, you can bulk upload 100s of messages at once, you can schedule your tweets to automatically post at optimal times, and you can choose the audience to engage with by location, demographic, and language.

You can listen to trends and compare keywords, filter out what you don’t want, and generate leads. Analytics allow you to track your brand growth, see your demographics visually by gender and geography, and see what content has the most impact. You can measure your retweets so you know which content your readers are engaging with.

This is also a good project management solution. You can collaborate with your team by posting assignments. This is a great way to reduce multiple work and it cuts out the need to send multiple emails. You can manage your team by project, department, or region.

There are three different pricing plans for Hootsuite.

The Free plan is for personal use and lets you manage up to 3 social media accounts.  The Pro plan is $9.99 per month and lets you manage up to 100 accounts. This is a good plan for business. The third plan is Enterprise. This one is good for corporations. Prices are given based on various options and can only be obtained by contacting sales directly.

SocialOomph

SocialOomph is designed to boost your social media productivity. It allows you to schedule updates, find people to follow, and monitor social network activity. It works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks. The professional edition allows you to schedule your WordPress posts and pages. The reason it’s on this list is you can schedule and post both tweets and blog posts from the same app. This allows you to integrate blog and social media updates. You can manage an unlimited number of blogs and autofeed your blog with RSS to blog. Posts are written with a WYSIWYG editor.

There are lots of features to help you save time and get more traffic. You can schedule tweets and posts, track keywords, perform keyword searches, save and reuse drafts, and purge your tweets. It includes tools to help you make decisions about who to follow. These tools allow you to follow those who follow you, mimic follow up to five accounts at a time, find targeted friends through keyword searches, sort into Twitter lists, and auto spam control based on decisions that others have made. You are provided with lists that you can make decisions about friends to follow and what to consider as spam. You can also tweet via email if you wish.

SocialOomph Professional has two packages. The first is the complete package which allows connectivity to WordPress. It costs $17.97 every two weeks. The second package is a subset that gives you all of the professional features that only relate to Twitter (so Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are excluded – but so is WordPress). This package costs $6.97 every two weeks. To get the best SocialOomph has to offer, which can increase your productivity and help you get more traffic, I recommend the full package.

Plugins

There are several other plugins for WordPress that let you schedule tweets of your posts. Many of them will work with other social media services by integrating them directly into WordPress.

WP Tweets Pro

With WP Tweets Pro is a highly configurable plugin that allows you to schedule tweets so they go out at specific times. They can be tweeted up to 3 times at intervals you choose. The delay allows you to check your tweet before it’s posted. For multiple authors it will publish to a different Twitter account for each author and they can select which accounts to post to. Tweets can be filtered by categories, tags, custom filters, etc., so that only posts that meet certain criteria are tweeted. You can post with custom templates and custom text. It will upload featured images to Twitter and you can tweet moderated and trusted comments. You can even use post tags as hashtags and stock tags, and replace tags in the title or excerpt with hashtags.

There are also some good features for tweet management. You can view the scheduled tweets and delete them. You can view all of the past tweets that have been stored by the plugin and repost any of them to Twitter. You can also view an error log of any posts that have failed to tweet.

This is a premium plugin with two different licenses. The single user license is $39 and can be used on a single site. It includes access to private support forums. The multisite license is $99 and can be used on an unlimited number of sites.

Revive Old Posts

The purpose of this plugin is to share your old posts to give them new life. This is a great way to revive old posts and promote your content. It will also share new posts. It will let you set the time between posts, choose the number of posts to share, and use hashtags. There are five link-shorteners to choose from to make your links easier to use in Twitter. It will clean and validate your code to keep it streamlined. Plus, you can add custom hashtags based on categories and custom text and exclude categories from posts if you wish.

The Pro edition is an add-on that allows you to use images in your tweets and lets you post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It also provides an options panel that lets you tweak your settings, such as your logo, social links, colors, and layout.

There are three licenses, which limit the number of websites the plugin can be used on. A single website is $49, 2-5 websites is $89, and unlimited websites is $119.

Evergreen Post Tweeter

Evergreen Post Tweeter is a free plugin that will post tweets of your old posts on a schedule that you set up. You can set up the schedule by day and time. It will tweet your posts and your pages. It also lets you set up filters so you can decide what kind of posts to tweet. You can filter by category, tag, or age. Another feature I found interesting is you can add text to the tweet. This way it’s not just a retweet. It’s a new tweet that happens to tweet an old post. This will make your older posts more visible – getting you more traffic without you having to write only new posts. It includes a selection of URL shorteners, too.

WP Hootsuite Dashboard Plugin

The Hootsuite service can now be integrated into WordPress with the WP Hootsuite Dashboard plugin from Jagged Edge Media. Instead of having to leave WordPress, go to your Hootsuite account, and schedule your tweets about your latest post, this plugin lets you do all of your Hootsuite scheduling and posting directly from within WordPress. You can schedule your posts to many social media networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more. It works with all levels of Hootsuite including the free account.

WP to Buffer

This free plugin sends updates to your Buffer account for automatic scheduling for posting to your social networks that you have set up in your Buffer account. It sends updates for your pages, posts, and custom post types. You have granular control over when the updates are sent and which updates are published. You can even set the text format, tags, post titles, excerpt, categories, dates, author, URL, which social networks to send it to, etc. You can override the update if you wish, in case you’re just making a minor update to the post, as well.

Buffer My Post

This free plugin sends your new and old posts to Buffer to help raise interest and bring in traffic. It’s a great way to revive old posts. You can set the time between tweets and number of posts to send to Buffer. You can use hashtags, and you can exclude categories and specific posts. You can also choose which Buffer profile each post is sent to.

Wrapping Up

There are plenty more services and plugins out there that can be used to improve your workflow and getting more traffic. Some of the better options are premium, but even the free options will do a lot of work for you. No matter which you choose, whether it be a service, a plugin, or a combination of both, using tools such as these can greatly speed up and streamline your ‘tweeting about my latest post and old posts’ process.

How about you? Do you schedule your tweets? Do you tweet your blog posts? Have you used any of these services or plugins? Did I miss your favorite? I’d like to hear all about it in the comments below!

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