I’ve discovered a way to “cheat” on Twitter, and I thought I’d share it with you.

Okay, it’s not really cheating, but it kind of feels like it. I’ve traditionally tweeted in a couple of bursts a day, generally whenever I’ve opened up a Twitter client to see what’s happening.

Tweeting in bursts isn’t attractive in a Twitter stream, and it can be overwhelming to followers, who see nothing from you and then see a bunch of tweets at once. But if I see good stuff to retweet, I want to hop on it right away. Otherwise, I’ll forget.

That’s where Hootsuite comes in. As you probably know, Hootsuite can be used to schedule tweets. Well, why not use it to schedule your retweets? That’s what I’ve started doing. Now when I see something good to retweet, I schedule it to go out in an hour or so. Then the next one goes out 15-30 minutes later and so on.

Not only is this good for you and your stream, it’s good for the person you are retweeting. Think about it. If you schedule some time between you seeing the tweet and it appearing in your stream, it spreads the exposure of that tweet out a bit. Which makes it more likely to be seen.

Tweetdeck has a scheduling feature, which should allow you to do the same thing, but I’ve found that feature to be unreliable, which is why I’m still using Hootsuite for my scheduling.

What do you think? Cheating? Or just good time and relationship management?

Tags: social media, task management, time management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 6:31 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.