For the last few days I’ve been working with Tweetlater an online tool described by the developer as “A Productivity Tool For Busy Tweeple” and a “personal Tweet scheduling engine and RSS feed”.
If you don’t already know, Tweeple are people who use Twitter, the fastest growing micro-blogging service on the Net.
Tweetlater allows you to manage scheduled Tweets and setup automated new-follower replies. It also allows you to set up and manage Twitter keyword tracking & alerts
I have been using the automated replies and keyword alert features with great results. In my inbox today I found a message from Tweetlater titled “How To Use Your Personal RSS Feed” Here’s what it said…
“If you have a Blog, you can put this feed in the sidebar. It will contain only the tweets that you schedule for your RSS Feed account. This can be added to your Blog regardless of whether you have your Twitter stream in your sidebar or not. This feed doesn’t contain any of your Twitter tweets.
You can very easily use it to put a “Thought Of The Day” section in your sidebar. Or, if you know your users’ birthdays, you can schedule a birthday wish for each one and display that in the sidebar. Perhaps you’d want to have a “Daily/Weekly Recommended Site” in the sidebar. You can use it for quotes, revealing “secrets,” anything that will make sense for your site and visitors.
It’s brief, punchy, and can be very powerful.
If you run a business, the potential uses are even more.
The RSS feed can be the channel where you announce special deals, discounts, coupons, etc. Since you can include links in the tweet, you can point folks to a page where they can get more information.
You can put the feed on your site, and/or you can ask your customers to subscribe to the feed. I think in an age of information overload, they will appreciate the fact that the messages will never be more than 140 characters. Imagine if folks subscribe to the feed with their mobile phones, and they get your short and powerful messages wherever they are at that moment.
I think this is a very powerful way of showing appreciation and respect for your customers’ valuable time. Give them a very brief (but alluring) notice and let them decide if they want to get additional information. That’s often better than sending them a ton of info, just to have them ignore it, gloss over it and miss the most important point, or unsubscribe because they’re already getting too much to read every day.”
I’m going to work with this feature as soon as time permits. In the meantime, if you have any feedback about using the Tweetlater RSS feel free to leave a comment on this post.