Twitter is a great tool for busy professionals whose schedules often keep them from attending live networking events. You can take part in conversations at whatever time best suits you, even if the other parties aren’t online at the same time as you. Although convenient, this is not without its drawbacks.

blue alarm clock

The most obvious is that you can’t answer time-sensitive questions. If someone is looking for a restaurant in Pittsburgh that’s open at 11:00 PM on Sunday night, they aren’t likely to welcome your suggestion on Monday morning, even if you know where they can get the Best Cheesecake Ever.

A second problem arises if your followers aren’t online when you post your best content. Of course, it will still be there when they log in, but they might not go back far enough in their feed to see your posts, especially if they’re following a large number of people and don’t use Formulists or another way of organizing the people they follow.

The situation is compounded if you like to post a lot of retweets and/or links to other content. I’m very sorry, but if I go into my Twitter account and see 10 or more tweets in a row from you, chances are I’m not going to look at any of them, unless I am a rabid fan. There might be some really good stuff there, but I’ll probably miss it, just because you’ve flooded my newsfeed.

Fortunately, none of these challenges are insurmountable.

In the case of the time-sensitive question, don’t assume it’s too late for you to answer. You can always ask if they found what they were looking for. Even if they did, or if they no longer need it, they’ll probably appreciate your asking, and you never know where a conversation might lead.

Much to my delight, I’ve recently discovered a solution for the second problem as well. Timely is an online tool that analyzes your last 199 tweets, determines when you tend to get the most engagement, and suggests the best times for you to tweet based on those results. If you use a service like HootSuite or TweetDeck, you can use those results to schedule your tweets to be posted at that those times, even if by then you’ll be busy with your client or tucked in for the night.

You can even take things a step further, and create a Timely account. Choose how many posts you want to make per day (1, 2, 5 or 9) and whether or not you wish to schedule tweets on weekends. Then, instead of typing your tweet into the Twitter site or your usual app, enter it in Timely, and it will be scheduled for publication at the time when it’s likely to have the most impact. There’s even a bookmarklet available, so when you’re reading a great blog post that you want to share with your followers, you just click on the bookmarklet and it will ”create a Timely” with the title and URL for the page you’re on. Simply edit it to incorporate your own words and any hashtags you want to include, and add it to your queue.

For every tweet you post using Timely, you can see how many people clicked on your link, who retweeted it, and the potential reach as a result. You can even add multiple Twitter accounts and multiple users! I think it’s pretty amazing for a free service, but there’s a pro version available for $9.99 more if you’d like priority email support.

I still use TweetDeck for sending replies, but am beginning to use Timely more and more for my regular tweets. My followers benefit, because they’re more likely to see the valuable content I share, and they’re not getting it all at one time, and I benefit from the increased engagement and exposure. It seems to be a win-win situation!

For more tips on using Twitter to grow your business, check out my Basic Guide to Networking on Twitter.