timely – Information Maven

Dear Twitter Friends (Tweeps):

We’ve all done it – thought of a clever idea, jotted down ~~140~~ 120 characters and then clicked “send.” Yet, as Dan Zarrella and others have noted, now is not always the best time to publish content. There are a million (or at least, as many as you can think of) ways to publish content (to Twitter or another channel) at a time of your choosing, and I don’t use any of them. Why?

I’m Lazy

Enter #lazyweb. I love to have conversations and to share content with people. I don’t love having to schedule when the updates appear, what time they should show up, and from what Twitter handle they should originate. I manage 5-6 handles – so this might be a problem specific to the very socially active – but I think it’s a challenge (and a response to that challenge) that more software companies should address.

Enter Timely

I’ve been using Timely by the folks at Flowtown for several months now, and I can honestly say it’s changed my life. For the better.

Timely gives me three things I can’t seem to find anywhere else:

The ability to schedule content updates from the browser and not have to specify which time they are published;
Publishing content to multiple twitter handles and scheduling the frequency and publication of that content automatically;
And (this is most important) the outstanding product UI/UX, easy editing of that content and good-enough analytics that let me know when I have shared or written content that others care about.

Ok, cool! It’s easy to use and provides some utility. So how do I use Timely?

Sharing Relevant Content to Different Audiences and Segments

Timely helps me to publish content at a time in the week when I’m more productive (Thursday Mornings, Saturday Mornings) and to spread out that publishing activity for an entire week. That way, I can spend less time gathering content I think my different audiences might want to read or share (whether that’s for a personal blog, a professional feed, or #justbecause) and more time engaging in conversations with my friends (and future connections I don’t know yet.)

Timely is also excellent at allowing me to schedule content I find from a discreet audience segment. I find great content sources from Email newsletters, from @Gist, from Google Alerts, and other sources, and it’s a quick bookmark action to schedule something in Timely (and then to get right back to what I was doing.)

There are some cool updates dropping soon for Timely, chief among these the improvements you see in the screenshot for this post:

See the entire conversation around the post, without having to go to Twitter;
Enhanced analytics to tell you more interesting things about your content.

If I had one thing to ask from the Timely team, it would be to allow me to save my favorite posts into a bucket in my account so that I could post them later. If I had one thing to ask from you, it would be that you give Timely a try if you’ve ever scheduled or thought about scheduling Twitter updates. And if you don’t like it (or if you do), let the team know! They are responsive and provide great feedback.

Ever find some information you’d love to tweet? And then another? And then another? You know you shouldn’t really be posting these all at the same time, but scheduling that tweet to hit at a particular time is a pain. This is the exact problem that Timely (http://timely.is) tries to solve, and does so quite well. I’ve made Timely part of my productivity tool kit.

Timely allows me to bookmark tweets for later publication (very easily) and to do that for multiple accounts at a time. The coolest part? It picks when to publish those tweets, favoring weekdays and high-traffic times of the day. This process is painless and makes it possible for me to take a few minutes at the beginning of my week and schedule 1, 3, or 5 tweets per day for the rest of my week. Timely allows me to spend more of my time on the things that matter, not just publishing tweets.

So, why use this over any other scheduling feature like CoTweet (http://cotweet.com) or Tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com)? I don’t – Timely fills my need for scheduling, CoTweet for notification of mentions, and Tweetdeck for everyday posting. Timely is from the folks at Flowtown (http://www.flowtown.com) and their care for user experience and ease of use shows. I’d recommend Timely for anyone who’d like to delegate the task of “when should I publish that tweet.” And – as a bonus – they have statistics on the results of those tweets as well, letting you know which tweets garnered the most clicks, retweets, and reach.