It’s Twitter Tip Tuesday — every Tuesday we’ll focus on one Twitter Tip and show you how to integrate it into your social media strategy. This week we suggest that under certain conditions, your social media marketing strategy will benefit by adding a third-party, social media management tool to your marketing mix.

This article is not really for the Twitter novice. If you haven’t gotten on Twitter yet, or if you’re still finding your way around, here are some tips that may accelerate your implementation of this powerful platform. But if you’ve evolved beyond the basics of Twitter and yet you’re not quite sure how to progress, perhaps it’s time you considered using a social media management tool to elevate your Twitter presence to the next level.

Scheduling Tweets for Optimum Visibility

Do a little poking around on Google and you’re likely to find an active debate on the merits of scheduling tweets in advance. At Sprout Insights, we would never advocate complete automation of your Twitter feed. After all, you’ll increase the likelihood of engaging with your target audience if you’re present when you’re actually doing the tweeting.

Sometimes, however, you may have a blog post that you’d like to tweet out to your followers — but you know you’ll be away on the day it’s published. Or perhaps you sell products to customers overseas and you’d like them to see your tweets at midday their time, instead of 3 o’clock in the morning, your time. In cases like these (and innumerable others), it makes sense to schedule your tweets so that they appear at times you may not be online. Furthermore, you can use a tool like Sprout Social’s Queue to schedule your tweets at times that are optimized for your specific Twitter audience.

As it exists today, there’s no way to schedule Tweets using the native Twitter application. So, if you want to broaden the spectrum of when your tweets get published, and widen the potential audience of who sees your tweets, it might be time for you to invest in a Twitter management tool.

Managing Multiple Accounts

Twitter also limits you to one login per browser session. In other words, without using some kind of kluge or workaround, you can’t log in to more than one Twitter account at a time. For casual or recreational Twitter users, this doesn’t present a problem — one Twitter account is often enough.

But if you manage accounts for other businesses, or if you use more than one Twitter account to engage with different audiences, then you’ll need a third-party tool to keep up with all these various Twitter profiles.

If you’ve been managing multiple Twitter accounts by any means other than a professional Twitter management application, do yourself a favor and try out a few applications to see what you’ve been missing. Chances are, you’ll see a positive return on your investment based just on the time you’ll save managing your various accounts!

Additional Requirements

Professional grade social media management tools often provide additional features like Twitter task assignment to various members of your social media marketing team. Other advanced (and useful) features not yet available on the basic Twitter client include things like generating reports and accessing historical information about your followers.

Basically, if you use Twitter in any professional capacity (and since you’re reading this blog we assume that’s the case), incorporating a social media management tool into your regimen will pay dividends well beyond the costs of the service.

Have any great Twitter Tips you’d like to see in Twitter Tip Tuesday? Let us know in the comments, along with how we can reach you if we use your tip!

This article discusses Sprout Social, our social media management tool for businesses. To learn about our editorial ethics and our commitment to objective coverage of the social media space, visit our About page.

[Image credits: ASurroca, Roger H. Goun]