The Best Time To Tweet

Posted on by Ron Shevlin

Do you hold back from tweeting a tweet because you’re afraid it’s the “wrong time” — worried that not enough of your followers will see your tweet?

If you do, you might be interested in an article on MarketingVox titled When Is The Best Time To Tweet? The article pulls together some recommendations for the optimal time to tweet from sources like Social Media Guide and Guy Kawasaki. Here are my reactions to some of the recommendations:

  • The Social Media Guide recommends tweeting at 9AM PT because you hit the west coast as they’re getting in to work, the east coast as they’re taking a lunch break, and England at the end of their day. My take: Won’t work. Everybody knows folks on the west coast don’t get into work until 10AM PT (if at all) and the Brits have bolted by 4:30 in the afternoon.
  • SM Guide also suggests using Tweet O’Clock to determine the best time to tweet a particular individual. My take: If you want a particular person to see your tweet, put their Twitter ID in the tweet, or — better yet — DM them. Duh.
  • Guy Kawasaki says don’t worry about tweeting too many times — send important tweets at least four times at 8 to 12 hour intervals. My take: If you don’t mind being nicknamed “Spammy Sammy”, then, by all means, follow Kawasaki’s advice.
  • Predictive Marketing concluded that “each business has a unique set of followers with their own Twitter ‘time fingerprint’.” PM went on to recommend that marketers should “track [their] followers to see when they are most active.” My take: If you’re an individual with 100 followers, maybe this advice is feasible. But for a business with 10,000+ followers, doing this is practically impossible, but more importantly — it’s a complete waste of time, effort and resources.

Personally, I can only conclude that the best time to tweet is……right now.

Tweet this:
Add to Twitter

Advertisement

9 thoughts on “The Best Time To Tweet”

  2. Pingback: Tweets that mention The Best Time To Tweet « Marketing Tea Party -- Topsy.com

  3. Ron,

    This produces sleepless nights for me – literally, because of timezone unfriendliness. Actually from a traffic and tweet reach perspective I find that Tweeting in the morning UK and then again morning US time works for me.

    I find that Mondays are poorer for responses/RTs and the weekend is dead. So the best time isn’t necessarily right now…

    I don’t agree with Kawasaki – I don’t want to spam people.

    BK

  5. Brett: I hear you. Especially for someone who is in….where are you, anyway? I was making fun of ppl on the west coast (of the US) and the Brits, but the SM Guide’s recommendation for 9am PT is about the best one of the bunch. But it ignores an important consideration: The type of tweet you’re tweeting. If you’re alerting folks to a blog post you’ve just published, then yes, you’d like to reach as many people as possible with a tweet, because — I agree with you 100% — you don’t want to do too many tweets and look like a spammer.

    But the reality is you just never know how many of your followers are going to be paying attention to twitter at any given time. Trying to “time” tweets is really a crap shoot.

    And while I agree with you that weekends are generally dead, on the other hand, if you DO tweet on a weekend, the tweet might be less likely to get lost in the noise and volume of the onslaught of weekday tweets. That assumes, of course, that your followers follow a lot of ppl and have an onslaught of tweets coming at them. And that’s not a very good assumption, necessarily.

    All of this is why I think tweet-timing is never going to be a science. Got something to tweet? Just do it.

  7. Great points about a common sense approach to using another social media outlet. “Spammy Sammy” gave me a laugh since I am about to unfollow Guy Kawasaki which is too bad. I swear he has something to automatically tweet which is annoying.

    If you are on someone’s follow list and tweet with relevant information, your link or information is almost certain to be read – or glanced at as seems to be the norm with Twitter.

  8. Thanks, as always, for commenting, Joe. I hadn’t even thought of any of this as a “common sense approach”, but seeing that made me realize what it is that I didn’t like about the recommendations I was referencing in the post: Namely, that there are folks who are trying to turn this into some kind of science, with heuristics for when, and how often, to tweet.

    The underlying issue with tools like Tweetoclock is that it captures when someone tweets — and not necessarily when they’re listening (or reading). I don’t know about you, but I tend to read more than I tweet. 🙂 So by knowing when I’m “likely to tweet” actually says nothing about when I might be “likely to read”.

  9. Interesting note about Guy Kawasaki. I heard him on a podcast interview recently talking about Twitter and he admitted that he is never on Twitter. Never. He posts through Posterous, all tweets are scheduled and every tweet contains a link that goes back to Alltop to register a pageview so he can charge more for advertising.

    Spammy Sammy indeed.

Comments are closed.