Welcome to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter applications.

The verdict on seven free online Twitter scheduling apps

When you have a company Twitter account, odds are there will be several people posting. And if they are all posting at once, your tweet stream can become cluttered and come off as the worst thing possible: spamy. To prevent this from happening in our own agency, we wanted to find a tool that would allow multiple users to schedule tweets. 

Before we set out to find the best app on the web, we created our wish-list of the 12 qualities our perfect tweet scheduler would have. We wanted to be able to:

• use it for free
• schedule tweets at any time during the day
• have tweets recur so that they would post multiple times in the same day
• shorten URLs
• support multiple Twitter accounts
• post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet
• spell check scheduled posts
• handle an unlimited number of scheduled tweets
• be web-based
• translate our posts into other languages
• provide extra relevant functionality beyond scheduling tweets
• easily navigate and use it with intuitive GUI

My methods were simple. I visited each site and registered. I scheduled a tweet, took a screen shot of the scheduling interface and then spent about 10 minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After the tweet posted, I rated each app against my wish list.

Click to enlarge image

Twuffer is probably the simplest and easiest to use of the automated Twitter tools. You log in with your Twitter name and password and no further registration is required. But making it simple and easy means they didn’t include much in the way of functionality. You can post a tweet to be published on the hour on any day up to the year 2019.

PROS:

• Simple registration
• Automatically shortens URL’s upon publishing tweet
• You can see the queued tweets and sent tweets
• Clean and easy to use with no explanation of how it works

CONS:

• You can only publish on the hour
• You cannot set recurring tweets
• Can’t handle multiple accounts
• No way of knowing it will shorten URLs when you first use it

RATING:

Future Tweets is a step up. The user interface is simple and intuitive. The user can schedule tweets on any day down to the second for the next hundred years and beyond. You can either type in the time and date or there is an awkward clock that allows you to move the hands to set the time. It looks nice but is difficult to use. Tweets can be scheduled to recur daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. They have included a collection of simple icons like a skull and crossbones, music note, snowman and bio-hazard symbol. You can also flip your tweet to appear upside down and backwards.

PROS:

• Simple registration
• Allows you to opt out of showing people that tweet went through program
• Schedule tweets at any time or day up to the second
• Easy-to-use interface
• Can have a recurring tweet daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
• Cute extras like including simple icons in a tweet or posting it upside down
• English spell check

CONS:

• Can’t set tweets to recur more than once a day
• Can only support one user account at a time
• No additional functions

RATING: 

Boasting the most features of any of the tweet scheduler tool sites, Social Oomph is also the most confusing. Registration is simple, but once you get into the site the cluttered and busy design runs interference on your brain.  The site layout isn’t intuitive or simple. The site seems more concerned with selling their professional version ($29.97 a month) than facilitating the free user. This site is a mess. Which is a shame because it boasts so many features. When you do navigate your way to the scheduler, you’ll find you are limited to 12 tweets per hour and no recurring tweets unless, of course, you upgrade.

PROS:

• Allows you to post without identifying you’re using a scheduler
• You can save a tweet as a draft to finish later
• You can pick the time and date down to the second to publish your tweet
• Track keywords on Twitter
• Automatic shortening of URLs
• Automated follow and un-follow function
• Allows multi-account support
• Purge your DM inbox
• Create channels of 10 twitter users
• Tutorials to help learn the system

CONS:

• Site design is a mess
• Requires a sherpa to navigate
• Difficult to figure out how extra functions work
• The site is in your face trying to sell too hard

RATING:

Registering with the site is fast. Just log into your Twitter account to give their system access. Once in Twit Robot, you’ve got one of the best looking interfaces for any of the scheduling tools. You can schedule a tweet to appear at any time or day. From there, it gets confusing. There is a section called ”Auto Posting.” Because the section is hard-coded, most of the options are cut off by a predefined box that won’t resize – so you can’t see them, or use them. It appears to be an area where you can add an RSS feed, create a campaign of tweets or let the software add random auto tweets. The RSS feeds section is cut off, so how it fully works remains a mystery. You can choose to run this feature, but it defaults to ”stoped.” There is a feature called user search. I thought it would help me find users on Twitter. It doesn’t. It gives back Google search results.

PROS:

• Super-simple to register with the site
• Great for Twitter campaign management, in theory
• Attractive and easy-to-use interface
• Able to add an RSS feed to site to publish feed

CONS:

• Couldn't get scheduler to work. It seems to post on US central time and I couldn't find a way to change it.
• No recurring tweet function unless you run a campaign
• Interface cuts off half of the functions of the site making it difficult to use all the site resources
• It’s not clear if you can have more than one tweet in a campaign and how to schedule time intervals
• Doesn't have auto URL shortening feature

RATING:

Tweet-U-Later doesn’t have the most flamboyant site design. In fact, it’s pretty boring, but they aren’t trying to impress you with a pretty site. This site does one thing and does it very well. You can schedule your tweets based on time and date down to the minute for a public or private message. This is the one of two sites that allows you to change the time zone per tweet and schedule recurring tweets based on hour, day, week, month or year and limit the number of times it occurs. This is a great way to retweet an important post at different times of the day over the course of a day or week. Unlike other sites, you don’t have to go back in and unschedule it.

PROS:

• The only app that has rescheduling intervals of an hour on recurring tweets
• Ability to set recurring tweets according to time zone and number of times it occurs
• Allows private scheduled messages
• Easy registration

CONS:

• Doesn’t support multiple accounts.
• Can’t post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet
• Doesn't have auto URL shortening feature

RATING:

Twaitter has really thought through the issue of scheduling tweets and developed a terrific solution. You want to schedule a tweet? No problem. Pick the time down to the minute and time zone. It’s a recurring tweet? No problem, pick if it’s hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, if it will run forever, a select number of times or if it should end on a select date. Want to tweet in Swedish but don’t know any? Not a problem. Pick between 38 different languages. Throw in a spellcheck, a url shortening button and the ability to use multiple accounts and this becomes the most powerful free tweet scheduling tool available. If all that wasn’t enough, you can edit any tweets you have queued or already tweeted. The only drawback for my needs is that I can’t schedule posts to repeat on the same day.

PROS:

• It is has 10 of the 12 criteria from my wish list - the most of any app
• It is simple to register and easy to use
• Easy to schedule tweets and a nice selection of options
• Calendar view visualizes scheduled tweets by the day, week or month
• Will be adding the ability to add RSS feeds soon

CONS:

• Can't schedule tweets to recur in the same day
• Can't post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet

RATING:

Dynamic Tweets has a three-tier system. The basic system allows you to add multiple accounts, schedule up to 20 tweets and do minute-by-minute scheduling intervals. For $99/year you get additional features such as recurring tweets, bulk upload tweets and campaign tracking. They also have an enterprise level for businesses. The registration process is one page, but asks for more information than any other site. Most of it is optional, but name, address and phone number seems a bit much for a site to ask these days when you consider that other sites just have register with your twitter username and password.

PROS:

• Easy to work with multiple accounts
• Minute-by-minute scheduling
• Spellchecking
• URL shortening

CONS:

• You can only add up to 20 tweets at a time.
• Most of the options they want you to pay for you get for free elsewhere.
• Can’t set recurring tweets
• Can’t post without indicating that it was a scheduled tweet

RATING:

CONCLUSION:
Overall, Twaitter came closest to my wish list. It does almost everything I wanted it to do. First and foremost, it’s very easy to use and understand. While it does a lot, it doesn’t overwhelm you. The designers really thought through the issues and how to solve them. But in the final analysis, I will go with Tweet-U-Later for one reason: It is the only app I found that makes it easy to have recurring tweets on the same day. When working with followers in different time zones this is essential for me. Coming in at the bottom of the list is Dynamic Tweets. Too many of the options that they want you to pay for can be found on other sites for free. Social Oomph needs to rethink their site design. It’s too cluttered and every link feels like it takes you to a sales page for the pay version. There’s a great looking user interface on Twit Robot, it’s just too bad programming glitches prevents you from using them.

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Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He love to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.