Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Best Time To Tweet

If you're using social media for promotion, then the timing of when you do it is critical. Do it when most people are busy and not paying attention and you'll never get your message in front of them.

In a post a while back, I showed where the ideal times for Facebook posts were at 11AM, 3PM and 8PM Eastern time. Now a new study shows that later in the day is the best time to tweet as well.

According to Dan Zarrella, a researcher at Hubspot, who looked at millions of tweets and showed their results in a webinar entitled "The Science of Timing," the later you tweet in the day, the better. The reason is that from 2PM to 5PM your followers are more likely to see your tweet because there are fewer things demanding their attention. In fact, 4PM was deemed to be the best time of the day.

Zarrella also found that the weekends are great for tweet attention as people are more relaxed and aren't conflicted by work. The other thing that was interesting was that he also found that tweeting the same link multiple times a day is an effective strategy, and unlike excessive emails, people don't seem to mind. I know this for a fact because I've been tweeting my blog post links twice a day for a while now and can see the positive results.

Finally, Zarrella has also put together a nice page called TweetWhen that will analyze your last 100 tweets and tell you when the best times for you to tweet are. Mine's at 7PM on a Friday night so you can expect it then.

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Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

4 comments:

Kristian Jackson said...

This is definitely becoming an interesting topic, particularly when you take international time differences into account. Of course, this depends if you're broadcasting to a local or global audience. As I'm broadcasting to a global audience, I try to schedule those call-to-action tweets 3- 4 times over a 24hr period to coincide with peak periods of usage around the globe. Facebook items I repeat less as I'd like fans to see a variety of content on my page. I may repeat items over a period of days just at different times. (This has just given me an idea)

Your posting requirements are a little different as your tweets are mainly your blog postings, which as we all know, have greater longevity, so twice a day works for you. I know that here, in Australia, I get your tweets at an appropriate time for me.

Thanks for the Tweetwhen link, that's brilliant. I may even register for more info. Apparently 1AM on Thursday (EST) is my best time which, as it turns out, is 4pm local time (AEST). Ha, what a fluke.

Anonymous said...

Bobby, the fact that you repeatedly tweet the same post almost made me unfollow you. Very annoying. I found other ways to follow (rss).

Kristian Jackson said...

I don't see Bobby's recurring tweets as an issue, unless you're only following very few people, then his will pop up more frequently.

I unfollowed CherryTree Records for the same reason, but only because their activities were verging on spam.

Just came across another analytical tool http://timely.is/ This one gives you 4 optimum times.

Bobby Owsinski said...

Survey after survey says that a tweet has no staying power. If people don't get it right away, it's gone forever. Sometimes I'm really surprised at how well my 2nd or 3rd tweet on a subject do in terms of retweets. I won't go beyond that though - I feel it's too much.

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