The first I’m going to review is a lovely service from Flowtown called Timely. Timely focuses on one thing, and does so extremely well: scheduling tweets.
When first going to the site you have a simple page asking for a twitter username. After inputing your username, it does some “processing” and then tells you when it thinks your optimum tweet time is.
They don’t tell you exactly what formula they use to figure this out and instead just say:
We analyze all your tweets and figure out what times of day you get the best engagement, then we define these best times as “buckets”. Every account is unique.
My guess is that they look at (a) what time you typically get responses from followers, (b) where you live, (c) where your followers live, and (d) when your followers typically tweet. That’s all entirely conjecture though (but seems to make since). I’d be curious to know the algorithm though.
Anyways, what it is doesn’t necessarily matter. What does is whether it works or not. From my testing I’d say a resounding “Yes!” particularly for personal accounts. How it works is worth going into now.
After presenting you with optimum tweet times, you have the option of signing up. After this, you can start using the service to schedule tweets.
You have two basic pages to deal with: the scheduling page and the published page.
The scheduling page is above. Primary focus is given to composing tweets. You have the typical character countdown readily visible and then a large “Schedule” button and a slightly smaller “Post within 30 minutes” button. It’s easy enough as is, but there is one nice feature built in that you don’t even have to worry about — any link added in the tweet box is automatically shortened and, if you have a bit.ly account, it uses that so you can keep track of all of your tweet stats. You also get a simple stat box here as well as a look at your upcoming schedule. It’s all clean, simple and very easy to use.
The “Published” page is just as clean, simple and easy to use as well, with one annoyance: the giant suggested tweet advertising Timely. I hoped it’d go away after scheduling it once but no dice on that one. This page does though list your klout score, previous tweets and the stats associated with them. I enjoy seeing the “Reach” stat: it’s neat seeing how many others got your tweet in their stream.
Conclusion
I must say I really enjoy using Timely thus far. I like how easy it is. I like that it doesn’t have a heavy image focused layout — the page loads fast even on slow internet. I like that it focuses on a single thing and that it focuses on doing it well.
I also like that they limit scheduled tweets to 3 a day. At first I didn’t think I would but it makes sense. You don’t want to bombard your followers with an obscene amount of tweets after all. And if you are focusing on certain times of day, it makes sense to put your best thoughts forward then.
Besides the giant “advertise me” tweet box, there wasn’t much I don’t like. It’s already made its way into my daily routine.
BUT, I don’t think I’d use it at the organizational level. You can add multiple twitter accounts (a plus if you are tweeting for your organization) but I think there are tools out there that incorporate the scheduling piece as well as a host of other features that I don’t necessarily care about at the personal level but would at the organizational level. We are looking for something with a bit more “oomph” — something that actually shows your feed, that has built in re-tweeting and quoting capabilities, something that keeps more in depth stats and lets you easily expand your audience. There are tools out there like this, some of which I’ll review, so having another site to go to isn’t really appealing.
For personal use though, it definitely gets 5 out of 5 stars.