How do I schedule a tweet?

Sometimes, you don’t want a tweet to go out instantly. If you run an account for a business, for example, you might want a tweet to go out after office hours, without having to be at your laptop or on your phone in your personal time. So how do you schedule a tweet to send at a later time or date?

How to schedule a tweet

There are several ways to crack this particular nut. Hootsuite and Buffer are two popular choices, but for simplicity, we recommend TweetDeck.

TweetDeck, now owned by Twitter itself, is perfect for people who juggle multiple Twitter accounts for work and personal use. It allows you to see the feed, messages and mentions from multiple accounts on the same screen, choose which of your accounts to issue a tweet from, and a whole host of other advanced features.

It also allows you to schedule tweets for later delivery. You don’t even need to have TweetDeck running on your computer at the time you want the tweet sent.

It’s dead easy to get started with TweetDeck: log in with your personal Twitter account, and then add any other accounts you might have by pressing the Accounts icon (two heads) on the left-hand side of the TweetDeck interface.

When you want to schedule a tweet, click on the blue button in the top left of TweetDeck, which is the icon to send new tweets.

Select which account you want the tweet sent from by clicking on the relevant profile icon at the top of the screen.

Then compose your tweet in the space provided and click “Add images or video” if you want to add either of those.

When the message is ready, click the Schedule Tweet button and you’ll be able to choose the precise time (to the minute) and date that you want the tweet to go out.

What if you decide you no longer want to send that futuristic tweet? Don’t panic. Scroll along in the TweetDeck interface and you’ll eventually arrive at a column of Scheduled tweets. Find the offending tweet and press the bin icon to delete it. It can take a few minutes for scheduled tweets to appear in this column, so don’t worry if it doesn’t appear instantly.

Now read this: what does Twitter think you’re interested in?