I believe that most marketers and businesses agree that during times of natural disaster, terrorist attacks or other tragic events that cause everyone to stop in their tracks, we do not want to conduct "social business as usual." +Debra Donston-Miller wrote a commentary for +InformationWeek shortly after the April bombings at the Boston Marathon about the importance of knowing when to react quickly - and when tragic events occur, the consensus seems to be that automatic updates should be postponed.
While it may seem like a relatively simply solution to postpone scheduled posts until a later date, in reality this is becoming more and more complicated with every new app that we allow access to our social media accounts. I did not think that I personally used very many scheduling apps; however, when I began to list all of the accounts that I would need to login to in order to "stop" my Twitter account from posting, a different story soon emerged.
1) Triberr - Each day, I go through the feeds and choose posts written by my tribe mates to post to Twitter. I generally choose about 10 per day and they automatically post at one hour intervals.
2) RoundTeam - I have rules set up to automatically trigger a retweet based on specific keywords used by people I have on a list.
3) Buffer - Using my Chrome extension, I add posts to my buffer throughout the day as I browse the web to keep it topped off. These are scheduled to post to Twitter at optimal times.
4) ManageFlitter - I have a few of my own tweets scheduled to post at optimal times throughout the day.
5) Paper.li - Tweets are automatically sent out when the paper is published, also automatically since I am using the free version.
6) SponsoredTweets - These are tweets I have written and approved and they are scheduled to be tweeted automatically once the sponsor has approved them.
I also use a few others and my Google+ account is set to automatically post to Twitter, although I usually post directly rather than schedule my Google+ Tweets, so that is not a problem.
I suppose the options available to "Stop the Tweet" are to:
A) login to each account and manually delete or reschedule each post (time-consuming, likely to forget an account or two, may not be able to reschedule);
B) login to Twitter and disable access to all apps and grant access at a later time (not a bad solution, but likely would need to go in to each account and reschedule the Tweets that were not sent); or
C) deactivate the Twitter account and reactivate it within 30 days before it is permanently deleted (probably not good for business, can take 48 hours for everything to appear normally again, would still probably need to go in and reschedule all missed posts).
None of these seem to be an "ideal" solution, and what I think could likely happen is businesses would eventually just let the posts go ahead and post as scheduled rather than take any of these steps. Not because they are insensitive; rather because they simply do not have the time, the money, the man-power or the fortitude to spend time undoing what has already been done and then redoing it again.
So, what is the solution?
I believe that Twitter could easily provide the perfect solution that would work both quickly and effectively and allow businesses and profiles to "go dark" during times of crisis - by using drafts. Twitter's mobile app currently saves posts as drafts if a connection to Twitter is not available; once the connection becomes available, the draft can be sent. I think the perfect solution would be for Twitter to provide users with the ability to enable a "set to draft mode" option. Once triggered, all incoming posts that had been previously scheduled would go to draft status and could later be tweeted or deleted by the user when they are ready to start posting again.In the meantime, I choose option B. Of course, this only takes care of Twitter....
