If you’re looking to reach an audience with your online communication, there can be no better platform than one of the social giants, Twitter. However, there can be times where your tweet doesn’t seem to have garnered any interest – not because it’s not interesting, but because it was poorly-timed. After all, you could be tweeting one of the most interesting messages in the world but if your target audience is asleep, they’re probably not going to see it when it’s most relevant.
Timely’s here to fix that. It ensures that your tweets are sent out there when they’ll have the highest impact. Read on to find out more.
Overview
Timely is a web app designed to ensure that bad timings of posts don’t ruin the communication between you and your core audience. Providing a killer uncluttered interface, it analyses each users’ previous posts and allows them to add more to a queue and based on its data, only pushes them to the live social network account when Timely feels that they’ll have the best effect on the audience. It’s free and only takes seconds to get started so you can be sure that your tweets’ timing can be optimised extremely quickly.
Overview
Getting Started
Timely offers a couple of ways to begin using the app. Before you sign up, it might be worth using the quick and simple testing-out tool that it offers. This is basically a quick way to analyse your recent tweets and have Timely work out the best times to tweet based on previous engagement in those times. It’s a great method of seeing what the app will be able to do for you before you sign up and if you’re happy with the results, you’ll be able to begin registration.
Analysing Tweets
It doesn’t ask you for much, just to enter your email address and choose a password and once this is complete, you’ll be able to authorise the app through your Twitter or Facebook to ensure that the app is provided with the relevant permissions to allow the actual posting of the statuses.
Connecting Accounts
When prompted, simply choose to give the app the permission and you’ll be able to begin taking advantage of it.
Authorising Twitter Account
Posts
After registration and authorisation is complete, users are instantly able to begin adding posts to the queue to be published in the future. The interface is incredibly simple to use and everything is clearly laid out to ensure that users don’t get lost when attempting to navigate the app.
The Dashboard
The first step to actually using the app is to add posts to the queue. These are the status updates that will be pushed to the relevant ‘social network’ account when the time is right. When creating the post, included is a count of the remaining characters left in the post as well as two buttons, one to add the post to the queue or one to directly bypass the Timely system and post it instantly.
Adding a Post
Once the post has been added to the queue, an optimum time for its posting is assigned and it will then be forwarded to Twitter or Facebook (depending on your settings) at that scheduled time.
Reports
Once the tweets have been published, Timely keeps a record of various statistics pertaining to that post. These typically show the reach count of that post, making it clear the number of users that would have had direct access to that tweet as well as other counts such as the number of retweets and also should the post contain a link, how many clicks that has had. The statistics aren’t incredibly detailed but that’s alright because the app does fine without providing advanced stats like that. In short, Timely allows you instant access to basic stats at-a-glance and does so extremely effectively.
Tweet Reports
Bookmarklet
What app of this kind nowadays wouldn’t be complete without some form of bookmarklet? Well, Timely’s got it covered. Once added and activated, the bookmarklet can allow users to instantly post the web page they’re currently browsing to Timely and automatically shortens the link. This ensures that should a user find a particular website interesting, they can automatically add it to their Timely queue within seconds.
The Timely Bookmarklet in Use
Tweaking Settings
The app also provides a few settings that can be altered to modify certain aspects such as how many posts to push to the accounts per day, whether posts should be sent at weekends and also email notifications can be configured to alert via email when the queue becomes empty. It’s also possible to connect the Timely account with Bitly in this part of the app to enable link-tracking through a personal account. Overall, it’s pretty easy to configure these little details in Timely, ensuring more effective use of the app.
Modifying the Settings
Final Thoughts
Altogether, I was quite impressed with Timely. Its purpose is to help Twitter and Facebook users post updates to their accounts when they’re most likely to get good and useful interaction from other users. I have to admit that it takes this otherwise-overlooked need and provides a solution that handles the problem almost perfectly. The interface of the app itself shouldn’t be overlooked, either, from its simplicity because it’s really nice to use and would make a great alternative to adding posts through the Twitter website itself.
Other apps that do this sort-of thing don’t focus on the problem at hand, merely offering the solution as an add-on. Lots of users don’t want this – me, for one – and I’d much prefer to have Timely take care of accurately scheduling tweets as opposed to having it as just another feature in a web-based client. The app doesn’t over-complicate anything and does exactly what it promises by making the task a lot less frustrating in the process.
Overall, I think that if you’re serious about engaging through social networks, look no further than Timely. It has all of the elements of a promising web app in the making and could certainly benefit any users interested in embracing their online user engagement to its fullest potential.