When it comes to the wonderful world of Twitter there are countless articles explaining the best ways to engage with your audience, who to connect with or how to hashtag.
What I want to focus on is one aspect of one amazing tool. What does this tool do? It helps you to time your tweets perfectly so that they reach the largest number of your followers possible.
After you hit the tweet button and your message to the world gets thrown into the cascade that is the Twitter feed it doesn’t last for long. Depending on how many followers you have it can be an incredibly long way down the list in a less than a couple of minutes.
Sometimes you only have to blink to miss it.
On top of this do you know when your followers are actually using Twitter? Let’s just say it’s 20% on any given hour of the day. If you have an average of 500 regular followers that means your average tweet will potentially reach just 100 people at any point – and that’s before your message gets knocked down the queue. Suddenly that huge follower count doesn’t seem as impressive if you can’t get peoples attention.
Of course, 20% of your followers aren’t always going to be on Twitter at any given point, it will of course fluctuate throughout the day with both highs and lows at certain points. So, making sure that you tweet gets tweeted at the best time of the day is essential if you want to achieve maximum impact with your messages.
But how do you know that time?
Introducing Followerwonk…
Some of you I’m sure will have heard of Followerwonk, a collection of truly amazing gizmos and tools from the folks at Moz. I don’t want to talk about all the things that you can do with this although you should certainly take a look at to see what it can offer your business. What I want to focus on is the one aspect that shows you the optimum time for posting a tweet.
If you head over to the ‘Analyze followers’ section and add anyone’s Twitter handle into the search function you can see a graph that looks something like this:
What you see above is the hourly Twitter activity of my followers as a percentage throughout the day. As you’d expect the quietest time is 5am and the busiest time is at 3pm when just around 8% of my followers are scanning the site.
What does this mean for me though?
Firstly, that I need to be tweeting at the optimum time of 3pm, but also that tweeting are multiple times of the day is going to be more effective. If you take a look at the graph activity is pretty busy at multiple points in the day which are not far off the 8% point. So adding tweets at 9am, 2pm and 4pm would also be good useful.
The best part of this tool though, instead of making a mental note to try and tweet at those times, you can pass this data onto Buffer, who can then schedule your tweets for these times.
So less work for you and a greater impact for your tweets.