Your tweets may be exceptional but it won’t matter if no one sees it. Well-written content is just the beginning. On Twitter, timing is everything… when you should be tweeting. To tweet at the right times, you need to create a scheduling strategy. After all, there’s no point to crafting amazing tweets if nobody will see it.
Top Tweet Time
First, you need to identify the top tweeting times, and then decide how often you should post. There are several great tools available to help you learn when your followers are active on Twitter. SocialBro and Tweriod have advanced options for detailed analysis on scheduling your tweets.
Followerwonk is a free tool and sign up is effortless. Either of these will get you the information you need to better optimize your tweets.
The analytics from these Twitter tools come in chart form similar to the one below. It tells us the times our followers are most active by looking at their tweets.
Using the chart below as an example, you can see that your followers are most active between 11 AM and 2 PM. This is when you’d tweet the most because it’s when you’d get the most exposure. We also see that 6 PM to 10 PM is a high traffic time, so you’d want to treat this slot as a top time as well.
Tweeting Frequency
Now that you’ve identified the top times to tweet, you’ll need to figure out how often you should be tweeting. Using our sample chart, let’s determine your frequency. During your top times (11-2 and 6-10), you should tweet once per hour. If you have enough content, you could tweet every 30 minutes.
For your next highest hours, 2 PM to 6 PM, you should tweet at least two to three times (once every two to three hours). Again, this depends on how much content you have. From 10 PM to 10 AM, you should try to tweet three to four times (once every three to four hours) because this is your lowest traffic time slot.
Here’s a sample schedule. Tweet at each time listed
- 1:15 AM
- 6:45 AM
- 8:45 AM
- 11:15 AM
- 11:45 AM
- 12:30 PM
- 1:45 PM
- 3:00 PM
- 4:15 PM
- 5:30 PM
- 6:15 PM
- 7:00 PM
- 7:45 PM
- 8:30 PM
- 9:45 PM
- 11:30 PM
You may be thinking that this schedule is too intense for a single day. If you’re worried about annoying your followers, just remember how most people use Twitter. It’s a “quick on, quick off” social media platform. Only the most recent tweets show up at the top of a feed.
If your followers are following more than 100 people (and they probably are) they won’t be overwhelmed by your activity. Just try not to post every three minutes.
The alternative to a scheduling strategy is the “spray and pray” technique: picking 10-15 tweets and publishing them every two hours, regardless of traffic. This leaves you hoping that you can reach your followers by chance. It has all of the targeting and focus of a message in a bottle. We wouldn’t recommend it!
A scheduling strategy helps you maximize your exposure. By picking the right time to publish, you give your tweets the best chance of being seen by your followers.