Today, Twitter announced that brands and marketers using the company's ad product can now plan and schedule tweets up to one year in advance.
From Twitter's advertising blog:
These can be coordinated to go live with new or existing Promoted Tweet campaigns to enable you to plan your real-time campaigns at your convenience.
The idea here is to allow companies more time to plan and orchestrate increasingly complex ad campaigns around events or specific times, as is usually done in other, more traditional advertising mediums like television. Twitter is also hoping that the long lead time will drive up the real-time promoted tweet bidding wars that advertisers have been keen to jump on in recent months.
But even though this type of advanced planning is exciting for advertisers, brands should probably think long and hard before scheduling tweets too far in advance. As many have found out the hard way, auto-tweets have a rich history of backfiring at the most inappropriate times. So, here are a few examples to consider before #scheduling #that #tweet for Oct. 14, 2014.
There's that time last year that Nashville made hockey fans upset by forgetting there was an NHL lockout...
Oct 16,2012: Nashville Predators vs. Colorado Avalanche: 7:00pm: Bridgestone Arena Nashville... http://t.co/bC5RU04n #NashvilleEvents
Nashville, TN Events
@nashvilleevent
Oct 16,2012: Nashville Predators vs. Colorado Avalanche: 7:00pm: Bridgestone Arena Nashville... http://t.co/bC5RU04n #NashvilleEvents
There's this tweet from Rep. Tim Griffin, which came out just minutes after this month's Capitol Hill shooting...
Or the time Live Nation Ontario forgot to cancel its tweets after a tragic stage collapse at a Radiohead show
Or when Entenmann's accidentally fired off a #notguilty tweet just after the Casey Anthony trial verdict.
Women's Health magazine found out the hard way about scheduling tweets during 2012's shooting in Aurora, Colorado.
So did the NRA...
Be careful out there, #brands!