Tweetlater: Advantages and Disadvantages
This brilliant tool, which I’ve been using for a couple of months, has made a tremendous difference in my time saved with Twitter management. For one thing, I work with a variety of others to assist in the management and development of their Twitter profile while they continue to focus on their business. They do the normal chatting things, I take care of the other stuff.
The Other Stuff
No sane business person is going to spend the number of hours necessary in the early stages of establishing a Twitter profile to increase their Follow list; their business can’t afford the distraction! As such, many of my clients and business peers (not industry) were hesitant to jump into Twitter. In their eyes, Facebook was enough of a drain on their time.
In Comes Tweetlater
Tweetlater is another tool that came into my sphere some time ago, and has no direct connection to other automated pieces of the puzzle. It’s sweetness comes in the UI and the opportunities it presents. Helping others manage their accounts, and managing my own accounts (for more than one site and industry), whether it simply be monitoring, tweaking, or re-strategizing, it becomes very useful having streamlined means to navigate all these profiles without constantly logging in and out.
Advantages
Read their home page and you will see a host of benefits they talk about. Listed below is my own list of useful pieces of the puzzle, and my personal recommendation with it. If I omit anything from their own list of benefits here, it still remains for you to discover as I did not find significant value in my sphere yet. We rarely use all the drillbits in our power drill, we use the drillbits for the kind of jobs we do most often.
- Automatically sends Welcome DM (direct message) to new followers
(our recommendation: Don’t, it bugs a lot of people) - Autofollows those who Follow you. (
our recommendation: DO, they’re interested, build your list, you’ll be able to leverage their audience too) - Auto-Unfollow ensures Tweetlater drops the shifty people who like to Follow to get you following them, and then Unfollows thinking they’re 1) making their life easier with their data stream, or 2) enhancing themselves as more of an expert by articially influencing their Follow list without showing any reciprocity. This is dependent on other factors.
our recommendation: DO, you’ll be glad you did. Once you reach a certain level, this becomes less a factor, however when building a list this is key to keeping it consistently growing - Optional @Replies Digest Email helps you review the responses people sent to you each day in case you didn’t get logged in.
our recommendation: DO, as a busy professional, you will find this saves you tons of time and allows you to laser target your responses as necessary. This will minimize the time and effort with social media conversations. - Manage Many Accounts with TweetCOCKPIT is available for the Pro-Version. You can still manage multiple accounts free of charge, however, the TweetCOCKPIT view enables me to monitor and action all accounts from one page. BIG SAVER!
our recommendation: DO, when you are promoting more than one website. Websites are keyword and destiny specific most often. There is more background to this advantage than I can explain here. - Delegating Twitter Account Management ensures that I can also extend access to other Tweetlater professionals. They access only the account I give them access to, so as a team (as designed personally) you leverage each others time and talent.
our recommendation: DO, if you have a team or staff, this will get more active participation going across the Twitter accounts of these staff and the company stream. A big piece of this is strategy and set-up, and offers more uses than I’m sharing for the sake of brevity.
Disadvantages
As a subscriber to this service, I find myself in the uncommon position of wanting to share a disadvantage or two about this tool. As I began, I started with the Free before moving up to the Pro version and watched it benefit me overall. Once at the Pro version, I immediately began taking advantage of more of the features.
- Recurring Tweets: One feature in particular that I liked about the Pro-version is the Recurring Tweets. This is a brilliant idea. We know what self-promotional bits and links we want to share through the course of the week, so why not pre-schedule them? This just allows you, as a business person, to manage your time commitments and keep working on your business. But there is an apparent disadvantage.
As Twitter matures, more features, tools, and applications pop up that other Twitter accountholders use. Whether it is a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, or a browser plugin, I’ve noticed that the Twitter streams are revealing more detail about the Tweet, rather than just the content provided.
Why I feel it is a disadvantage
When I began using it, and had the other automated tools working, one of these other tools emailed me a Unfollow report everyday. In it I would see who unfollowed, and what Tweet came out right about the time they unfollowed. Observing this over the period of a couple weeks (I like to be sure), I found that people consistently unfollowed the Tweetlater recurring tweets.our recommendation: DON’T, unless your systems, purpose, vision, and audience are the type that will support what you’re doing.
- Account Management Interface
This isn’t an uncommon complaint of mine, it’s just that Tweetlater also needs to know about it, consider it, and hopefully make some improvements.
Managing data is a task, and not always a fun task. As users of systems and interfaces, we want to see and experience solutions that streamline and improve our experience. One very important aspect is saving time. As with most online software services, this seems lacking.
With rows of accounts, tweets scheduled, etc., I prefer the concept (not a proposed solution, only making the point) of how spreadsheets work (databases too). If I need to delete a bunch of records, Select All, Delete. In Tweetlaters case, as an example, I’m stuck Deleting one tweet at a time. This is painstakingly tedious when when I’m cleaning things up.
OVERALL
I like it, use it, and don’t think about it much anymore. It has become my friend and I’m comfortable suggesting you try out the free version, and then upgrading to the Pro to take advantage of its other features.
By the way, being a Pro user, all upgrades and additional features are available to us.
