Until recently, managing social advertising has been a very hands-on process. Social media managers who lacked third party tools found themselves having to manually post tweets and start ad campaigns in real time. Twitter recently made a change to give everyone a little more breathing room and lay out a comprehensive marketing plan for the future.

Scheduled Tweets

In mid-October, Twitter announced that they’d be allowing all of their advertising customers to schedule both organic and promoted tweets up to a year in advance. Those tweets can also be associated with ad campaigns to boost visibility as they go live.

Creatives Tab
A “Creatives” tab has been added to the ad interface so you can view all your scheduled tweets in one place.
Compose Tweet Button
Scheduling options will appear alongside delivery and promotion options when you compose a new tweet.

Instead of being tied to a computer and working on holidays, you can now create full-fledged campaigns with to-the-minute accuracy. If you have an upcoming event you need to promote and want to send out reminders to registered attendees, you could set up scheduled tweets for that. If you want to keep content fresh overnight or on weekends, scheduled tweets should be able to help. They’ll also help with coordinating campaigns across multiple mediums, such as running a Twitter campaign to reinforce a hashtag you’re using in a banner or print ad.

Caveat Tweeter

As all social media experts are fully aware, the only constant in the social landscape is change. Reacting in real time to trending topics will always be a must, and you might find a scheduled campaign starting at an inopportune time. If major news breaks in the middle of the night, you probably won’t want your tweets sounding oblivious or insensitive to current events. Not to mention that if you think up a campaign right now, it’s difficult to tell how relevant it will be in a year’s time. So schedule your campaigns, but make sure to revisit them frequently and make updates, changes, or cancellations as needed. And, as always, monitoring your Twitter account so you can respond in a timely way is still critical.