Pablo Fernandez

Here’s an idea for those Twitter clients, web and desktops out there: deferred posting.

One tweet per hour during eight hours is much more effective than 8 tweets in a row. But sometimes you want to write eight tweets in a row and I find two reasons to do that.

You are using Twitter professionally, for your work, as a marketing and social tool. You want to minimize the hit it takes on your productivity so you limit yourself to 15 minutes of tweeting per day. In those 15 minutes you generate tweets for the whole day, you want them to be automatically distributed through the day.

When you open twitter after some hours of not using it, like after sleeping, you’ll find yourself replying to lot’s of stuff as you go through it. That’s specially true if you are 8 timezones away or so from most people you follow.

I think a Twitter client should do the distribution automatically. It could distribute them evenly through the day, depending on how many you have on your queue. Whenever you want to tweet you just add it to the queue.

Why limit itself to one day? why not leave tweets for tomorrow? And if not one day, how long? A way to solve the problem is to try to maintain your speed constant, minimize acceleration and deceleration.

For example. If you normally tweet 5 times a day, and you have 10 tweets in your queue, do 7 today and leave 3 to tomorrow so that you don’t double the speed, you just increase it a little bit. If tomorrow you add another 10, you’ll have 13 and you are at a speed of 5.2 (previously you were at 5, but yesterday with 7 you sped up a little). So today you get 9 published and 4 left for tomorrow and so on.

You’ll have different speeds on weekends and business hours. There’s a curve of speed and the Twitter client should try to match it with what you have on the queue.

If you want to direct tweet, you can do that, just fine.

Another interesting way is to match the curves of you readers instead of your own. The tweeter client would measure when your readers are posting more, and presumably, also reading more. It’ll make an average and it’ll have the curve of speed of your network. Instead of posting following your previous curve, it’ll post following your network’s curve maximizing the amount of people that is likely to read your Tweet.

I would call that, Professional Tweeting.

Another interesting feature would be to set importance to your tweets. More important tweets are sent when the chances of getting it read are highest, when the curve reaches its peak.

Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you! Twitter carved-wood icon by gesamtbild.