All in all, it was of course a rather inappropriate mistake, but it does show that even when you automate everything, you have to keep paying attention. Comedy Central was not the only one who accidentally left the Twitter bot running. National Geographic also tweeted through the silence:
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National Geographic later said that they had thought of it, but something went wrong with setting the time. Lame excuse if you ask me:
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And Bol.com, certainly a big name, also made this mistake. However, the e-tailer handled it a lot worse, in my opinion. Bol immediately removed the tweet, after which the community managers sent everyone who had noticed the same message via a mention. A public apology did not come until 9:30. Because the message was sent to all followers so late, many people responded separately and bol.com sent many of the same answers, of which this is the first:
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Benefits of Scheduling
It should be clear that scheduling these types of messages can have unpleasant consequences. However, that does not mean that scheduling tweets and other messages for your social channels is necessarily bad.
Preparing messages can be very useful and efficient for companies, brands and community managers. You prepare all your messages for a certain period at one time, so that you do not have to post occasionally throughout the week. If you know when which part of your followers clicks on what, you can respond nicely to that. Of course, that does not mean that you should then ignore your social media accounts for the rest of the week.
For some purposes, scheduling posts at fixed times does work well.
For example, you can always count on the times that Frankwatching publishes new articles, so that you don't have to look in the meantime.
But for many other types of posts, fixed times make greece mobile phone number list much less sense. For example, no one really wants to see the National Geographic photos; that falls more into the category of "if it comes along, I'll take a look." I also don't think anyone would have minded if Comedy Central had announced at 8:09 PM that they would be airing new episodes of Men at Work on Sunday night, instead of exactly 8:00 PM.
In fact, I think there are a number of arguments for not tweeting at fixed times and full hours. First of all, a tweet that is not clearly 'robotic' comes across as much more personal, a quality that the experienced reader will understand very well.
Avoid the rush hour
Another important point for not tweeting at fixed times is that everyone is already doing it.
If the notification with your message in it has to compete with notifications from 10 other companies, you can be sure that not all your followers will see your post. If you set your message to a completely different time, the chance that it is not so busy is much greater.
If everyone does that, the load of tweets that users receive will be distributed a bit better and you as an organization will also have a much greater chance that your followers will see your tweets. With the previous point in mind, don't choose the same times every day, but provide some randomness.
Scheduling posts is, if you think about what you're doing, a strong and smart move, but one that could use some improvement.