What is the best time to twitter?
A new, very neat tool allows users to analyze twitter patterns: day, time and frequency of posts for a particular user. Bubbles show the number of tweets for a particular time for each day of the week as well as replies by that user for that time.
I ran reports for some of the top twitter users in tourism with interesting results:
Experience Columbus uses an RSS feed to push content. Most Tweets are pushed shortly after midnight EST / 9pm PST. What this means is that many times when I check Twitter in the morning, I have a long list of Columbus tweets sitting on top of each other. And first thing in the morning I have to check email - no time to check tweets. And therefore not the best strategy to engage me.
Baltimore also pushes feeds via RSS but also engages consumers with replies and non-feed posts. The feeds are pushed in the morning (8am / 9am EST) which seems to be a better time to get clicks of tweets.
Philadelphia has truly some amazing engagement with Twitter users, activity on Twitter is spread out over the day. I recommend following some of the discussions that are taking place here as a best practice.
Arizona has great engagement as well but all Twitter activity takes place from Monday to Friday between 8am and 5pm.
So what are the learnings? If you push a RSS feed via Twitter, time it so the tweets go out during the day, not at night. Even better, find a way to spread the tweets out so users have time to digest them. But don’t limit your account to pushing feeds only, that is not what Twitter’s strength is. Reply, discuss, ask, reach out. And if you really want to engage and connect with consumers, you have to be there 7 days a week. Hey, nobody said this would not be a lot of work!
October 27th, 2008 at 4:36 am
Thanks for the post, Martin. Up until what appears to be recently, our events feed to Twitter was set to push tweets out every half hour to every two hours. After reading this, I see that something’s gone wonky. Time to do a little troubleshooting - thank you for the heads up!
October 27th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Very cool analysis. I try to Tweet as often as I can. Most of it does happen in the morning by virtue of the work day taking me away from the computer. I actually added Twitterific on my iPhone and dedicated it to @BaltimoreMD in order send out Tweets while out and about in Baltimore.
I’m excited to start building programs that really activate Twitter. It’s a great way to keep constant contact, but we hope to drive some real action with Twitter and Facebook.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
There’s a different type of conversation going on at night and I think it’s crucial to connect with those people as well. I’ve also noticed a lot of interaction right around lunch time with our followers, more so than in the morning.