I've recently discovered Timley — a twitter device to help schedule your tweets for periods during the day that they are most likely to "succeed." Now, I haven't done a lot of research into other programs for scheduling tweets so I'm by no means an expert. But I do like Timely — quite a bit actually.
I have my blog feed linked to Twitter currently and I appreciate how when I schedule a post for a time when I am not at the computer it automatically updates Twitter for me with a link. I have found this to be the result in a huge boost in stats. Twitter has the fantastic potential to boost your blog — and while numbers aren't the be all/end all, I'm not naive enough to say that without (at least some) numbers I'd still be dedicating all my time to this hobby.
With Timely I can schedule tweets (extremely easily) so that when I am at school (or basically anywhere but on the computer), I can still be "actively" participating in the blogosphere. Now, perhaps participating is the wrong word as I can never know exactly what to "schedule" for conversation. But I like to use Timely to reacquaint my Twitter friends with older posts/reviews that they may have missed.
Timely (at least with a a Mac) is so easy because I can simply click a button on the window or tab that I want to tweet and a dialog box comes up and allows me to change what I want to tweet exactly (you know, to make it more interesting) and the short link is already include! This is a huge time saver for me! It bugs me that I have to go to bit.ly whenever I want to tweet a link and include a decent amount of text. The whole process looks kind of like this. I simply "drug" the "Create a Timely" button into my header bar in Safari and now I can click it from any tab or window.
Below, see the "Create a Timely" button in my middle toolbar (ignore all my tabs — that's how I role)
Becomes this -----
(Without the awesome originality)
When you click "Add to Queue" that's it. There's no time preferences (that's preset) and nothing else to worry about. You can fool around with the preferences and choose how many times you want to post a day, so you can add a week's worth of queued tweets depending on how many times you click "Add to Queue."
It doesn't have to be your own blog either, this is a great way to quickly Tweet someone else's post in the future.
Under the Performance tab it let's you know how (obviously) Timely is working. For instance, I "re-tweeted" (haha kind of like Pete and repeat) a post that I had written MONTHS ago and 25 new people clicked the link (hopefully presumably reading it) and I potentially reached 5,000 MORE people! I found this just amazing!
I'm still learning the basics of Timely, but it has already definitely been proven a useful program in my standards. It's ability to allow me to be constantly "present" on the web and it's easy to use nature makes Timely perfect for the busy blogger.