Article's Content
Article's Content
After over a year of testing & iteration, Twitter has released a new tweet scheduling feature that users & brands can use directly on Twitter. The new feature offers users and brands the ability to schedule their tweets in advance. For example, if you want to schedule your posts to be more spread out rather than flooding your feed at once – Twitter’s scheduling tool offers that functionality.
The experience for crafting and scheduling new tweets seems very straight forward:
Not quite ready to send that Tweet? Now on https://t.co/fuPJa36kt0 you can save it as a draft or schedule it to send at a specific time –– all from the Tweet composer! pic.twitter.com/d89ESgVZal
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 28, 2020
You craft the tweet directly on Twitter as per usual:
But notice that little calendar and clock next to the emoji?
Click that and it will allow you to schedule this post as far as three years out:
This is huge for brands, marketers & Twitter power users.
Here’s why:
Scheduling tweets offers a plethora of benefits:
- It allows you to plan for launches / key announcements.
- It offers the ability to be active while doing other things.
- It offers the ability to connect with folks on different time zones.
- It provides the ability to space your content out over a day.
Brands and users of Twitter from coast to coast should rejoice!
What Does This Mean For SaaS?
The industry leaders in the world of Social Media Management Software should be nervous.
Each month there are more than 3,000 searches on Google for some variation of “Tweet Scheduler” or “How To Schedule Tweets”. More than 3,500 searches each month are for variations of the best Social Media Management tools or software. That’s a lot of demand. And it makes sense, because whether you’re responsible for social media management for a small business or a large enterprise, automation can help your consistency, reach, and presence.
Fulfilling that demand has been very profitable. A handful of companies have played a key role in the marketers toolkit as a solution for scheduling tweets. The act of using software to schedule content in advance has created a handful of multi-million dollar businesses.
Until now, the scheduling of tweets was something you could only do using TweetDeck (acquired by Twitter for $40M) or a third party solution. Companies like Buffer, Twittimer, Agorapulse, SproutSocial, SocialBakers & Hootsuite will all be impacted in some way by this announcement.
Today, more than 69,000 people use Buffer for scheduling their content on channels like Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook. The company boasts an impressive $20 million annual run rate and is one of the best tools for social media management & scheduling. In 2019, Hootsuite told the Financial Post that they had 200,000 paying customers as they pondered the idea of an IPO.
There’s no question that this news hurts the social media management software industry. The demand that they were once able to fulfill is quickly evaporating. Is there still value in these services?
No doubt about it.
A one-stop place for scheduling and management is still valuable. But the users of these tools who aren’t managing multiple accounts could churn. A lot of questions are yet to be answered…
How many people were customers JUST for scheduling tweets?
How many people will churn in the coming weeks?
How will these companies improve their suite of products?
It’s going to be an interesting situation to watch.
Especially when you consider that Facebook has already introduced native scheduling on their platform. Twitter has now done the same.
Will LinkedIn be next? Time will tell.
