National Geographic later said that they had thought of it, but something went wrong with setting the time. Lame excuse if you ask me:
the tweet was scheduled in advance but due to the commemoration of 1959, something went wrong unfortunately
And Bol.com, certainly a big name, also made this mistake. However, the e-tailer handled it a lot worse, in my opinion. Bol list to data 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:
It should be clear that scheduling
A 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 example, you can always count on the times that Frankwatching publishes new articles, so that you don’t have to look in the meantime.
Disadvantages of scheduling on a full hour
But for many other types of posts, fixed times make much less sense. For example, no one really wants to see the National starting from “zero”: building a compliant phone number marketing list for services 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’ clean email comes across as much more personal, a quality that the experienced reader will understand very well.