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How to Use Timely.is to Improve Your Twitter Activity

Although Twitter is one of my favorite social media sites when it comes to promoting content I have written, it can also be one of the most overwhelming. I have two company Twitter accounts and one personal account where I need to promote content, so it can get confusing because there are a few things I need to keep in mind:

• I don’t want to tweet the same message on all three accounts, or even two accounts, at the same time.
• I want to promote my content throughout the day (and slowly throughout the week) on all three different accounts.
• I want to remember when I tweeted each article on each account so that I can tweet the same article at different times on each account later in hopes of reaching a new audience.
• Each time I click the “tweet” button on an article I need to make sure I am signed into the account where I want to be tweeting, so I am constantly jumping back and forth.

After a while, this song and dance was getting old. Not only was I tired with continually trying to remember these things, but I would often make mistakes. There are some days when my company has five pieces of content they want promoted, and I simply wouldn’t be able to keep it all straight. Even if you don’t work for a  company, Twitter could be made easier if you didn’t have to continually remember when you tweeted, what you tweeted, and how often you tweeted. Fortunately, I was not the only one who felt things were getting out of hand. A tool called Timely.is was created to help ease the hectic Twitter schedule. Below explains some of the benefits for the tool:

Top 5 Reasons Timely.is Works for All Your Twitter Needs

1.    A Timely.is extension lets the tool work just like a Twitter sharing icon.

Once you sign up for Timely.is, I highly recommend you download the Timely.is extension to your browser. You can then click the extension and a message will pop up that looks like just like a Twitter message. All you have to click is “Add to Queue” and you’re all set. It’s fast and easy, so there is nothing extra to learn. Instead of clicking the “tweet” button to tweet at that very moment, all you need to click is the Timely extension in the top right hand corner and it will tweet at a scheduled time.

2.    The tool will choose different times to tweet for each account.

According to the creators of Timely.is, the tool looks at your past 199 tweets and figures out the best time slots for you to be tweeting. Then as your followers grow, the tool will auto-schedule your tweets. This works great because you never have to worry about when you should be tweeting. You can choose whether you want to tweet 1, 3, 5, or 9 times per day and whether or not you want to tweet on the weekends. Then, the tool will make sure that you are tweeting that many times per day so you know that each time you hit that little Timely clock button, the tool will make sure that your tweets are scheduled hours apart. Below is a screenshot showing how you scheduling works:

3.    You can tweet from multiple accounts at one time.

Timely.is allows you to tweet from all of your accounts all at once. This will eliminate the need to continually switch from account to account. All you need to do is sync up your business and personal accounts to the Timely tool, and then when you want to tweet something you can select all your accounts at once. They will tweet at different times because your accounts likely have different followers and a different history of tweet times, so you don’t need to worry about tweeting the same thing from two accounts. Below shows an example of a tweet I’m going to put in my queue. Notice how all of my accounts are “check” below:

4. It is free to sign up and free to add multiple accounts.

Other tools similar to Timely.is charge for additional accounts, but this tool is completely free. You can have as many Twitter accounts as you’d like connected with one Timely.is account without paying a dime. The tool does offer a premium version of the service for $19.99/month or $199/year that offers analytics and Facebook and LinkedIn options as well as real-time notifications and e-mail tweets; however I am using the free version and find that it works great for my needs.

5.    The tool will show the reach of all your tweets.

When you use a plain old Twitter sharing icon, you don’t know how many people are clicking on your tweet. You can get an idea of how many people might see the tweet based on looking at your number of followers and the number of followers of anyone who retweeted your tweet, but who wants to do that? Timely.is will let you know how many people likely saw your tweet, how many people clicked on your tweet, and how many people retweeted (or reacted to) your tweet. This will give you an idea regarding which messages you might need to push a bit longer. Below is a screenshot of my dashboard showing some of my past tweets and their reach:

All of these benefits of the tool have helped me immensely in my Twitter activity. I still click a Twitter sharing icon from time to time if I come across something and want to share it, but Timely.is works great when you have a lot of your own content you want to promote. I will mention that I am also an avid Buffer user. I generally use Buffer when I’m browsing the Internet and want to tweet something, but not at that exact moment. Buffer allows me to choose the times I want to tweet, whereas Timely does not, so I often feel as though I have more control. You can learn more about the differences between the two very similar sites on Top Rank, and then let me know what you think!