After finding out the ideal number of tweets per day is a lot higher than I would have guessed (more about that in a moment), I was curious to find out the ideal times to tweet.
That’s what led me to discover the ‘sweet spot’ for Twitter timing.
I admit that I jumped on board the Twitter train a little early. Having been a Facebook fan for a long time I just didn’t ‘get’ Twitter at first, so I took the ‘wait and see’ approach instead (which I still highly recommend by the way).
In no time I became a Twitter addict. Every client I’ve introduced to Twitter has too. Even my Mother, someone who finds even simple technology overwhelming by default (sorry Mum, hope you don’t mind me sharing that, I’ll bring the Ginger biscuits next time we catch up for a cuppa) has caught the Twitter bug (or should that be Twitter worm?).
(PS: Kiwis eat more Ginger Nuts than any other biscuit says Griffins)
I find it’s best if you have a Twitter buddy to explain the ins and outs the first time (it only takes 15 minutes). Sure, there are a LOT of ‘how to’ articles out there about Twitter, but there’s nothing like someone right there answering your questions and pointing out the little tricks and tips that make Twitter such a powerful tool for something so incredibly simple.
Okay, let’s get into the juicy data:
After I got over how impressive it was in the first place that Gary McCaffrey was attracting thousands of visitors to his site per hour using Twitter, I delved into his handy chart about the best times of day to Tweet (the time is set to Pacific Time by the way). You can view the original chart by clicking Gary’s name above.
Check out these figures and you’ll see a healthy jump in consistent referrals from Twitter between 1pm and 2pm: the 1st Twitter sweet spot.
But what if you want to tweet more than once a day?
Posting anytime from 9am through to 3pm still increases the chances of attracting some nice traffic spikes to your site or blog thanks to your tweets.
From another point of view, tweeting that terrific link to your wonderful blog article at the wrong time, could cut your chances in half if you get your timing wrong.
How often should you tweet?
Another eye-opening analysis, this time from the inbound marketing gurus at HubSpot, gave me a valuable wake up call about the frequency of my tweets (summary: not enough).
Obviously not everyone on Twitter is utilising it as a business tool, however when the data comes from over 1.6 million Twitter users, I sat up and listened.
The average tweets for day (that’s TPD for those who love turning everything into acronyms like I do) is 4.422 and the average number of followers was 103.39 (by the way, please follow me on Twitter so I can become average!).
The 2nd Twitter sweet spot
HubSpot’s research discovered that users who tweet between 10 and 50 times per day (50?!) have more followers on average that users that tweet more or less frequently. Personally I’d be un-following someone if they tweeted more than 50 times a day!
So where’s the sweet spot? According to this data: 22 tweets per day.
Now if we combine 22 tweets a day with the first sweet spot of tweeting between 9am and 3pm, you’d be tweeting 3.6 tweets per hour over that time period – and that would get not only time consuming but also risks being pretty annoying and losing you followers – so use some common sense and find a happy medium that suits your message and your resources.
What’s best for your business?
The moral of these 2 sweet spots is that it could be very worthwhile for you to experiment with increasing your number of tweets per day and playing with different timing of your tweets. But remember to measure your results!
Free tools to track your Twitter success
I’d highly recommend using a simple, free tool like Bit.ly which not only shortens the URL you’re linking to in your tweet, but also tracks how many clicks you achieved (you need to log in to track the clicks generated just by you, it’s free). This is handy whether you link your tweets to your site or someone else’s.
If you have Google Analytics on your site or blog, you can also track the visits to your site from Twitter.
Of course you can also keep a record of new followers that join after each tweet. What you measure simply depends on what your goals are for using Twitter.
By the way, there’s no need to stop what you’re doing every couple of hours for every tweet. Use a free tool like Tweet-u-later to enter your entire day’s tweets in advance and have them roll out at the exact times and dates you specify later on (you can even enter tweets years in advance!).
On the topic of tools – Bit.ly and Tweet-u-later are just 2 of the many handy, free ways to get more out of Twitter – which Twitter tools do you use?
PS – See that green retweet button up there top left? If you found this article helpful, please retweet it now
As I target US clients this chart is certainly useful, but for businesses who target New Zealand and Australian clients it would be interesting to find out those sweet spots. Maybe some kiwi wants to volunteer?