When Do You Tweet Most? 

You may think you know the answer to this question – let’s find out. If you’re anything like me you’re probably wrong. Go ahead and take a guess. Write it down too. The day of the week and time of day you think you tweet most.

Now go to Xefer this extremely cool app and type in your Twitter handle.

Xepher will graph all of your tweets, replies and retweets by the day of week and hour of day. It’s very cool to watch the graph build and it works incredibly fast.

Here’s a graph of my tweets from 3 months ago. I was shocked to find out that I tweet most on Monday’s and 4:00 was my favourite time of day to tweet. This is important information.

Here’s another graph from today, 3 months and 2,400 tweets after the graph above. Apparently I’ve had a lot more meetings on Monday as my tweet volume has migrated to Friday and Tuesday.

Another way to use this information is to understand when your audience is online and most likely to be tweeting or retweeting. 

Putting Xepher to the Test 

With that information in hand we decided to do a test. We sent a few tweets out at specific times of the day and tracked when the message got retweeted and the when the link was clicked on. Using a promotional campaign we were running for Social Media Gift Certificates as the pilot, it started getting retweeted right away.

The campaign continued to get retweeted over a five-day period, which we tracked using a combination of Hootsuite’s stats and Google Analytics. We tracked the results over a five-day period and as you can see from the chart below the most popular time for click-thru’s back to the site were 11:00am and then again between 4:00 -5:00pm, which makes sense given who our audience is.

With this information we can tweak our next campaign to make sure there are more targeted tweets around these times. We can also take it a step further by testing copy lines in the tweets now that we know we have isolated the time variable.

Into Action 

Here are a few tips to  ensure your tweets are getting seen and getting acted on (replied to or retweeted).

• do the research to determine when your audience is engaged
• prepare a few different copy lines and use different ow.ly (Hoostuite) links to see if different copy approaches generate a higher response rate 
• track, measure and analyze your results to understand what’s working, what’s not and how to improve
• and of course, try to keep tweets you want retweeted to about 120 characters so they don’t require any editing

So how close were you in guessing when you tweet the most. Let us know in the comments box below.