Best Twitter Scheduling Tools

twitter tools

The best thing about Twitter is the real-time interaction it allows businesses to have with partners, vendors, customers, and prospects. But the best thing is also the worst thing: to have real-time interaction, you have to be on Twitter all day, and in business you can’t afford that.

Unless you can hire a full-time social media manager to tweet, post updates, and otherwise engage with people online, you need to plan your tweets ahead of time and use a platform to publish them for you.

To help you find the right Twitter scheduling tool for your business, we’ve compiled this list of free, low-cost, and enterprise-level platforms.

Free Twitter Scheduling Tools

Hootsuite free version: Probably the best known social media scheduling tool, Hootsuite shortens links, saves drafts, and schedules various social updates--including tweets and Facebook statuses--from a web-based dashboard.

Buffer free version: In addition to scheduling your tweets, Buffer uses data to help you select the best time to tweet. It can choose the time for you or you can specify.

Social Oomph free version: This app schedules tweets, tracks keywords and mentions on Twitter, and sends the tracking data to your email inbox.

Gremln: Planning tweets has never been easier than with this platform’s Tweet Calendar and RSS integration. Gremln also offers various paid social media scheduling plans.

TweetDeck: A powerful Twitter tool that must be downloaded to your computer, this app features customizable feeds, powerful filters, and notification alerts in addition to tweet scheduling.

Twitterfeed: This platform is built on customizable RSS integration, so you can automatically share links to your blog or other sites any time they update.

Low-Cost Twitter Scheduling Tools

Hootsuite: The Pro version of this app includes unlimited social profiles and RSS feeds, additional team members, and integration with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights for $9.99 per month.

Buffer: In addition to optimizing your tweets for the best time to tweet, the paid version of this platform allows unlimited posts, multiple social accounts, and more team members for $10 per month.

Enterprise-Level Twitter Scheduling Tools

Social Oomph: The Pro version of this tool allows you to post updates to other social profiles such as Facebook and LinkedIn, create tweets and updates via email and with RSS feeds, and lots more for about $35.95 per month.

Sprout: With advanced reporting capabilities and powerful tracking, this platform can help you see exactly how Twitter impacts your business. Optify also offers a full range of web and social media marketing tools. All plans include a free 14-day trial and price estimate.

Sprout Social: Depending on which plan you choose, this platform features robust reporting, brand monitoring, mobile apps, engagement tools, support, various integrations, and more. All plans include a free 30-day trial, and pricing ranges from $39-$99 per user per month.

How to Choose the Best Twitter Tool for Your Business

The only way to know which scheduling tools are right for your business is to conduct a thorough side-by-side comparison. Some things to consider in these comparisons are:

  • cost
  • posting updates to multiple social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
  • posting updates to multiple accounts (such as company and executive Twitter profiles)
  • built-in link shortener
  • RSS integration
  • number of users allowed
  • analytics integration and robustness
  • tracking and reporting capabilities

Also, keep in mind that this list only includes scheduling platforms. There are plenty of other Twitter tools you can take advantage of, as listed in this article on KISSMetrics and a few more listed on this article from Social Media Examiner.

Do you use any of these Twitter scheduling tools? How well have they worked for you? Please share your experiences in the comments!