Social media might take more time out of your day than you think. Americans spend roughly 35 minutes daily on the Twitter app and even longer on other platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

But this depends on whether you’re creating content or just consuming it. These figures don’t represent the time you’re offline drafting and crafting the perfect posts. They don’t account for editing and graphic design hours, nor do they consider the ten outtakes of that TikTok dance before you got it right.

The point? You’re probably spending much more than 30–40 minutes a day on your social media if you’re a content creator, business or dedicated poster. You also have other things on your plate, like running your business, traveling or going to your nine-to-five.

The good news is that you can save time by scheduling posts. Instead of going online every time you want to publish, you can set an exact time for your post to drop automatically. Here’s how to schedule Tweets and plan your content on Twitter.

Three reasons to schedule your Tweets

Before we dive into the tutorial, let’s review a few more reasons why it’s a good idea to schedule Tweets. Even if you spend a ton of time on social media because you enjoy it or it’s part of your job, there are benefits to Tweet scheduling. Here are a few:

1. You stay consistent: Let’s say you’re a musician and post a new jam session every Thursday. Your followers come to expect this content, but sometimes you don’t have time to get on social media on a specific day. Scheduling posts on Twitter will cover you.
2. You post better content: Planning your posts ahead of time allows you to put more thought into them. You may think a joke is hilarious today, but when you read it back in a week, it might not land. When you plan, you can sit with your content and shift posts around or remove them from your schedule.
3. You can post at the best time: You want to post Tweets when your viewers are awake. The Twitter algorithm boosts relevant content to the top, but it also considers chronology. This means that when your followers log on, they’ll see your newest content first — you don’t want your Tweets to get buried. Don’t forget to double-check the scheduling time zone before you post.

How to schedule your Tweets

If you have a Twitter business account, you can schedule Tweets from your ads account. We’ll describe how in the steps below.

If you have a regular account and want to learn how to schedule Tweets on mobile or desktop, you’ll need some help from a third-party Twitter scheduling tool. If you’re interested in learning how to pre-schedule Tweets for free, try finding a social media management tool with an entry-level plan that offers this feature. And, if you need to know how to schedule multiple Tweets, remember to check third-party apps, as some have a bulk scheduling feature. Search the app store to find one that works for you.

Scheduling Tweets is easiest if you have a business account. Here’s how to schedule Tweets with photos, written content, and ad cards directly from Twitter if you have a business/creator account:

1. Go to ads.twitter.com and log in.
2. Click on Creatives and then the Tweets tab.
3. Click on New Tweet in the top right corner of the page.
4. Compose your Tweet text and hashtags and add any photos, videos, or ad cards to your Twitter post.
5. Select whether the post is Promoted-only. If you choose this option, your Tweet will only go out to the targeted user for your Twitter marketing campaign and not all of your followers. This is something you’ll have to decide before you start scheduling.
6. When you’re done creating your post, click on the down arrow next to Tweet.
7. Select the Schedule button from the drop-down menu and select the date and time for your Tweet to go live.

How to manage scheduled Tweets

Don't worry if you’re having second thoughts about a Tweet you’ve scheduled — you can backtrack. If you aren’t using Twitter for business, you’ll have to follow the steps your third-party app provides for editing and removing scheduled Tweets. But if you are, manage your scheduled Tweets so that only your best content goes out into the world. All you need to do is:

1. Go to ads.twitter.com and log in.
2. Click on Creatives and then the Tweets tab.
3. To view your scheduled Tweets, select the Promoted-only Tweets button and toggle it to Scheduled Tweets.
4. If you want to edit a scheduled Tweet, hover over that Tweet and click Edit in the lower left corner. To save your changes, click Update scheduled Tweet.
5. If you want to delete a scheduled Tweet, click on the three dots in the top right corner of that Tweet and click Delete from the menu.

How to make a Tweet you’ll be proud to post

We’ll leave you with a few tips for draft Tweets you can feel good about. Whether you’re a business or you just like to post, putting some thought into your Tweets will make a huge difference in your (and your followers’) experience. You can write great Tweets by:

• Including videos and images in your Tweets: Twitter isn’t just for posting brief texts anymore. Tweets can now include multimedia content like videos, GIFs, and images, which will grab your viewers’ attention.
• Take advantage of your analytics: Click on the analytics button (the icon that looks like a bar graph at the bottom of the screen) on any given Tweet to see how it’s performing. You can also use your business account or third-party social media management app to track engagement. Find out which posts your followers engage with most so you can keep making more of that content.
• Cross-promote your Twitter account: You’re doing all this hard work to create a presence on Twitter, so show it off. Drive traffic to your Twitter profile by dropping a link in your bios on other social networks. If you want to add multiple links to your bios, get a Linktree URL, which can branch out to various locations on social media and the web.