Thursday, March 3, 2011

Tool Tuesdays: What time is the best time to tweet?

One of the big questions right now in social media is what time is the best time to tweet?  There are a few ideas out there.

Guy Kawasaki mentioned in his blog post, “Looking for Mr. Goodtweet:  How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter”

Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweet

Read more: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html

Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s social media scientist did some studies and found,

I noticed that retweet activity tended to peak around 4pm EST, suggesting that this might be the best time to tweet a blog post for maximum potential retweet reach.

 

When I looked at retweet activity over the days of the week, I saw that they peaked later in the work week, specifically on Friday.

Read more: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/12/06/whens-the-best-time-to-publish-blog-posts/

This all make sense but for social media to truly be social, I think the goal is to engage with my followers and a blanket approach is a good starting point but to really create a relationship, it has to be customized to my own followers.   That’s not to say I don’t tweet on Friday at 4pm EST and repeat the good tweets so more people can see it.  I believe in the Dan Zarrella’s science and Guy Kawasaki’s practical experience, I would never ignore hard evidence but I also want to make sure I understand MY own followers.  In comes, Timely which is aptly name for a service whose sole function is to schedule tweets for maximum impact.    It’s pretty simple when they break it down on their front page, so simple it provokes a DOH why didn’t I think of that and did that myself kind of reaction.  The magic is in the simplicity of Timely.

You add your tweets, it schedules to tweet out the tweets according to the time it thinks will produce the most impact – impact is defined as increase in retweets, mentions and followers.  The science of it is it analyzes your past 199 tweets and figure out the best time slot, it learns as your following grows.

timely Tool Tuesdays: What time is the best time to tweet?

Timely does absolutely produce results it promised – there is an increase in retweet, mention and retweet per tweet.  My only problem with Timely is, if it schedules consistently the same time I might miss out the opportunity to reach out to new followers to build relationships with people who operates outside of the time frame that yields the most impact.  I don’t solely rely on Timely, I use it to tweet quotes mostly.  I read and share all my links mostly live.   Even just figuring out what time is your most optimal times to tweet is very interesting, if it’s just for the sake of knowing but I believe in knowing what times to tweet also tell you a lot about the followers that engage you.

I hope you find Timely useful, if you have used Timely let me know your experience.  If you are going to start, pop back in at some point and let me know how it went.

Note: These are tools I have used for a substantial amount of time (> 2 wks) and have found useful for me, this is not a paid post and paid is defined as money, swags, free dinner, t-shirts, pens, free coffee, gift certificate… absolutely nothing!

Read more: Tool Tuesdays: What time is the best time to tweet? | The Social Network Hub http://www.thenetworkhub.ca/vancouver/2011/03/01/tool-tuesdays-time-time-tweet/#ixzz1FZJk9NvS

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