Scheduling Tweets from Google Calendar

Since more ad more social Media platform rise up i think all time how to minimize Page jumping and get a smooth social flow. Here i want to share a workflow to schedule Tweets out form Google Calendar or your Google Plus home with the help of some tiny WordPress Plugins.

There are many Services and Apps  who propose to schedule your tweets even Facebook updates. The downside most of them Tweet under their own flag Brand some are limited or you have to pay for that service. As a fan of Google  for many years why not use what you are used to work with and connect link it with your Webpage .The Setup needs about 1 hour for the inexperienced once done you can schedule your tweets as you like to reach your audience or marketing goals.

7 simple steps to tweet with your google calendar

 

1. Make a new Calendar for the Tweets

Not to mix up your Events with your tweets we make a extra Callander only for the Twitter updates. After named go to Settings and copy the public ICALL Link . Add some Event to the Calendar for test purpose on a day but only fill the Title field leave the details empty since you only have 140 characters for your tweet  that should be fine.

2. Make a Clone of the Yahoo Pipe Calendar Tweet Filter

Enter  your ICALL Calendar link into the top field. Run the Pipe you should see one event for today for now. In general it filters your Events by day and hour. If there is no event the result will stay empty. The Pipe Timeframe is set for one Tweet a day but it can be simple extended for that the feed get read every hour .

 

3. WordPress Prepare

4. You should have some kind of Tweeter Plugin installed and configured that tweet your  fresh blog post. If not choose one from the WordPress Plugin repository that fits your need there are many very good ones my fav is a .Chose one where you can enter Your Twitter App ID.

5. Install a RSS Import Plugin and enter as feed the Rss address of the yahoo Pipe fetsch time should be once a hour. RSS Feed import Plugins

6 Since you don’t need your Tweet post on your Blog frontpage make a new Category and hide it from the frontpage.  WPPluginUltimate Category Excluder

 

Make some tests if possible not with your main account and set the RSS import plug to post as Daft at the beginning after every thing works smooth as you like it you can feed  your main account.

How it works : you Yahoo Pipe filters the Calendar feed by hour and feed into your WordPress Blog where your Tweets generate a Post that get published the Twitter Plugin tweet your update in time. Since you dont need your Tweet post on your Blog frontpage make a own Category and hide it from the front.

Since all posts are still handwritten and/or personalised @metacowboy you audience will still like your tweets as the real time tweets from your account.

 

If you don’t have a WordPress Blog or Webpage you still can use the Google Calendar just get a account at  IFTTT  and chose the Yahoo Pipe as source only your Tweets will not be Branded  with your Domain they will tweet under IFTTT App Namespace. Danni Silva explain a simliar easy way to update Twitter via Google Calendar with Email to trigger your Twitter updates.

 

Last but not least a SEO reason too since Twitter and Google brake up there relation your tweets get very week indexed importing the important Tweets in to your Blog is more relevant  and boost your blog  beyond twitter. Dont forget the Twitter  3200 API limit every tweet you send after that will end in Nirvana as Twitter dont show more than 3200 tweets . That way you generate a natural backup of your promotional tweets and can measure the search traffic over time.

For Advanced  User

Since ICALL is a standard format for many or even most Calendars you can plugin nearly every online Calendar to the Yahoo Tube and it should work there are even some WP Calendar Plugins that support ICALL some Offline Calendar can be synced with google calendar.

Lets look deeper into that topic

Since Social Media owns many birthday with some kind of Calendar Publisher Workflow you can simply send a personal prepared Birthday wish to some or all Facebook Friends  in time .

Now you can go on your summer holidays without losing Klout Score and still have a active account for your fellow followers. Reach other time zones and languages that would not see your tweets. If you look at the famous Big they all use some kind of Feed App to distribute their Tweets. You can simple make tweets recurring as events. So why not from your own Blog and AppNamespace.

Everything for free as google service are free.

 

Update: since okt 2013 Twitter offer scheduled tweets for Marketing Add Account