Scheduled tweets if the lifeblood of any blog promotion on twitter. Most people are constantly checking their twitter so unless you are frequently updating at different times you will miss a majority of your followers. To know more reasons you should be using scheduled tweets check out 8 Reasons To Use Scheduled Tweets.

How To Set Up Scheduled Tweets

I use TweetLater to schedule my tweets. Its the easiest to use and has a ton of other features. Simply click the link and sign up for your account. Once your in you’ll need to add your twitter account and then you are ready to go. While you are there check out the other options. I use Auto Welcome, Auto Follow/Unfollow and Keyword Alerts.

Then add a URL shortener to your browser. An easy option is the bit.ly Bookmarklet. Just drag it into your bookmark bar to shorten URLs on the go. With bit.ly you can also track how many people click on the tweets you send, which helps you find out what your followers are into (what you should write more about).

Tweet Frequency

Depending on how much you have to say you may have a higher post frequency. However I would say that you don’t need to tweet more than twice every hour. I try keep to 1 tweet every hour, that way I am not overloading my followers twitstream but I still have a good presence.

To communicate with your followers in other timezones you should be sending tweets while you sleep. I send 2 of every tweet, one in the am and another at the same time but pm. This way I reach all of my followers.

Good Tweet Content

I find a bunch of quality articles at once and add them to my tweet schedule for the next couple of days. This is a massive time saver for me as finding a new quality article every few hours was getting quite time consuming! I also have a ‘tweetlater’ bookmark folder in my browser so I can save any interesting sites while browsing then add them to the tweet schedule later.

To find good content quickly I use social bookmarking sites and go through the “upcoming” sections for my topic. This way there is always fresh content and I can see what other people have found interesting already. This is great because it also keeps me up to date with whats going on. Here are a few social bookmarking sites to check out: Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn.

Your Future Posts

See 5 Easy Steps To Set Your Blog On Auto-Pilot for info on scheduling your posts to publish in the future.

Tweeting your new posts is a great way to start the traffic flow, and if your lucky a few people will retweet it for you too! You can schedule a tweet about a post that hasn’t even been published yet, just make sure the link isn’t released before the publish date.

If you are having trouble finding the link for your future posts this is my technique:

Write your post and set it to publish at a future date. Then go to Posts>Edit in WordPress Admin and click ‘view’ under the future post you want. Now you can see the actual post at its real address. Use that URL and add it to your tweet schedule a few minutes after it’s published. I also send the same tweet out again 12 hours later so you can get your followers on the other side of the world.

Click the link above to get started with your TweetLater account.

Stay tuned for tips on using scheduled posts effectively.