HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella has been studying tweets for two years, and he’s come up with some rules of thumb for the best frequency and timing to tweet. If you’re interested in driving new followers, for example, get ready to tweet an average of 22 times a day. Looking for the most retweets? Tweet later in the day.
Zarrella has even created a tool, TweetWhen, to suggest the optimal days and times for your account. Here’s @lostremote‘s analysis (above), which shows an optimal time of 6 p.m. ET. And Sunday and Saturday, respectively, as the best days to tweet. For Facebook, weekends are even bigger performers. The logic is simple: find times that aren’t cluttered by everyone else’s tweets and status updates. And weekends are when people have more time to thoughtfully consume — and respond — to content.
By the way, if you’ve ever felt guilty for sending the same tweet more than once, you shouldn’t. Zarrella has found that sending the same tweet 2-3 times a day is more effective than sending it once.
For the full rundown, here’s are Zarrella’s slides. Highly recommended. For a longer write-through, here’s Nieman Lab’s story.
