Buffer or Hootsuite for scheduling tweets for free

Scheduling Tweets for Free

After you use Twitter for a little while you may decide to take it to the next level.  This usually means building up content and tweeting out the content multiple times and at different times during the day.  When you first get started, you probably want to do it on the cheap!  FREE is good!  Here is my experiences with trying to schedule tweets for free.

Using Buffer to schedule Tweets for free

Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) was recommended to me as the best app to use to schedule tweets.  It was easy to get going, you just need to connect to your Social Media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.).  I found that it didn’t always connect properly and asked me to re-connect a number of times to my Facebook account.  Once connected, it was very easy to schedule tweets and ‘buffer’ them.  It allows you to set up a bunch of specific times to send out tweets on any given day or every day.  For example, if you want to tweet out every hour on the hour you would set up tweet times of 1am, 2am, 3am, … 12am.  I then proceeded to schedule a bunch of tweets.  After scheduling 10 tweets, Buffer would not let me schedule any more tweets until I upgraded to the Awesome plan at $10/month($8.50/month on yearly subscription).  10 tweets is not a lot!

Using Hootsuite to schedule Tweets for free

Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) was also recommended to me to schedule tweets.  I found Hootsuite was a little more difficult to understand at first.  Once I figured out the Streams and how to actually schedule a tweet, it was easier.  So, you would go to Streams, then add your Social Networks.  To see your scheduled tweets, you select your particular social network in the ‘Add a Stream’ pane, then a new pane will open which lists the scheduled tweets for that social network.  To schedule a tweet is fairly easy.  You enter your post in the space at the top of the application window, then select the social network(s) to post it to, then you have the option to Automatically Schedule it or manually schedule it.  I found that when you automatically schedule it, it only will schedule about 4 tweets per day out.   I could not find any options for changing the automatic scheduling.  If you manually schedule tweets, you can schedule many per day.  The manual scheduling involved selecting the day, hour, and minute to send the tweet.  I scheduled tweets every 15 minutes for days and it worked fine.  So, it allowed me to schedule 100s of tweets.  There was also an option to schedule tweets from a file, but I didn’t test it out.  So, Hootsuite allowed me to schedule 100s of tweets for free!

So, what free scheduler to use?

This was an easy decision: Hootsuite.  Buffer just doesn’t allow you to schedule many tweets for free.  Buffer was easier than Hootsuite to schedule tweets for specific times.  Hootsuite just allows way more tweets to be scheduled for free!  Once it becomes economically justified to pay $10/month to schedule tweet, I will reconsider using Buffer to schedule tweets, but in the meantime, Hootsuite is my choice!