Social Networking on Time

The thing with time is that if your not on it, you might have missed it. The opportunity windows are small and meeting with others' shedule might be tricky. This is the same in the ever so present online networking world. Nothing is more boring than a static profile page as you might have on linkedIn or Academia. However, this is one of the option for not to get missed, just be always there.

In the ephemeral world of twitter, facebook, gowalla or foursquare this is not an option. If your facebook page hasn't changed in the past day, something is wrong, if you haven't checked in at any location that day on foursquare you must be very ill and in bed and if you did not send any tweets in the past hour this isn't gona work.


Image taken from tech cocktail / timely logo.

The flow of tweets however, does not guarantee that if you tweet your tweet is being read. On the contrary things are changing fast and as a tweeter your basically battling on your own against the rest of the tweeter kingdom for a sunny spot on the top of any readers list, but on time. Right at that moment this follower of yours is actually reading the first three tweets on the feed, picks the one you wrote and retweets or replays or clicks, but does something with it.

This is tricky, but time is on our side, or better the human desire to organise around it in cycles. Even here on tweet-eden routine rules the behaviour and there is a certain time of the day your tweets will have the prime spot, most-impact-in-24-hours-moment it would be called.

And of course there is an app for everything - here is TIMELY. It is simple but functional. Write a tweet you want to send out, timely looks through your past 199 re-tweeted tweets checks them agains a 24 hour timeframe and calculates the time of the day your tweets had the most impact in the past. At this very moment in the upcoming 24 hours your tweet will be sent. Ever though of something like that?

There isn't much more to it, really. And to proof the point, the guys at timely, actually flowtown, provide you a basic statistic with the past tweets send on this platform showing the number of clicks, the number of retweets and the number of readers (potential readers) your tweet has had so far.

With this you can really start to enjoy your day. No more worries about keeping up with the bomb shell tweet, just follow the stream of incoming messages, relaxed you can watch other struggle along with tweeting, everything with the peace of mind that your three tweets scheduled will be on time. Thats all that counts.


Image taken from single-blogs on flickr / Screenshot of my timely performance panel.

Of course timely does offer other functions, for example you can have multiple accounts, or invite other people to schedule tweets on your timeline, this is great for collaboration on one account. It features an integrated url shortener that actually work The settings allow you to controle how many tweets will be sent per 24 hours and accordingly the analysis will be adjusted. Weekends can be different or ignored and you can also force a tweet to go out in the next 30 minutes, of course timed to fit the best time frame.

One thing to mention though is that the management of the queue, you can prewrite a whole list of tweets, is tricky since there is only a delete, edit or move to the top button. A move up and down, especially for the top few in the queue would be very handy.

Anyway try it for yourself and get your tweets out on time. At least some of them, you can still use in parallel other platforms to reply or interact, this is gona be the back bone to keep your twitter account running on time!