September 8, 2013
Be a round-the-clock newsroom without round-the-clock staff
News happens 24 hours a day, but if you have a small newsroom you don’t have a lot of people to work all day, all night and through the weekend. With programs that schedule tweets, though, you can fake it.
Using these programs, you can create a bunch of tweets, then pick times for them. So, for example, even though no one is working in the evening or on the weekend — or at least no one with social media in their job description — you can make it look like there is.
Got an exclusive tidbit? Upload it to your website’s CMS to be posted at 7:30 p.m. Then schedule a tweet with a link for 7:35 p.m. And there you have it — breaking news while you relax at home after supper.
But how about weekends? If you’ve got news that will stand for a day or two, schedule tweets about it for Saturday morning before you leave on Friday afternoon. Got some features? Schedule three or four tweets about them over Saturday and Sunday.
One of the main reasons people like Twitter is because it gives them the news as it happens. You might not have the staff to do this, but you do have the technology.
I use Buffer to schedule tweets. But there are other programs that also work well, such as TweetDeck and HootSuite.