By Nick Parkin of Pimlico Flats. Follow him @pimlico_flats.
It’s a common expression that in life, timing is everything. On Twitter, nobody tells you that your effectiveness is more dependent on timing that any other online activity.
Time your reading.
Beginners always think that twitter involves reading everything. If you want to give up your life do that by all means, but sensible people will limit their reading to appropriate times and ways.
Rather than becoming a slave to other people’s tweets, read at a time of your choice. Save yourself time by reading in bulk, rather than one tweet at a time. Switch off for periods and don’t worry about being out of the loop – if there is something important it will come round again. You can reconnect with everybody when you are ready, and the internet being what it is, they will be there waiting for you when you are ready.
Time your tweeting.
There is no point to tweeting when there is no one listening! Who are you hoping will be reading? If they are in a particular time zone, then you need to time your tweets when they are awake, and if you are in a different time zone to your audience it may be worth your while using Tweet Later.
Know when your audience is listening. This will vary from person to person, but my own audience is listening from 08:00 till 09:30 when they switch off to get on with some work. They reconnect at about 16:00 – 18:00 as they wind down the day’s work. My audience is UK, so those are GMT times for me. Take the time to observe what time of day you get retweets, replies, and when your followers tweet. Those times are the times that you should be tweeting yourself.
Vary your tweets to the time of day – don’t flirt with an audience in the office, don’t tweet a technical analysis to followers who have just had their third glass of wine and are relaxing on the sofa at home. Make your tweets appropriate to the mood of your followers, not to your own mood!
Don’t waste your followers’ time, that is the quickest way to lose a reader. Try to make every tweet worth reading. Don’t retweet items that everyone and their dog is retweeting, you won’t be first and they don’t want to read it AGAIN. Make time reading your tweets worthwhile, be unique and add value. When retweeting use the | character and add your own view after to make your tweet different and better than the original.
Take Time to Sharpen Up
Finally in the words of Covey’s “7 Habits of Successful People” – Sharpen the Saw. Take time to improve your tweeting, read, and learn.
@rahuljrark
I agree, if you tweet at a specific time, you get more RT’s compared to other times. It necessary that you find out the proper time so that your tweets are read by a large number of people
@unoblogger
Exactly, right said on twitter. Though it is something that i’ve realised over time through my tweets, this sort of an article is important for people across domain understand the same
@kindspirit
These are great tips! And thank you for telling me about Tweet Later.
@reese
Hey Nick,
Excellent article. My favorite take away was the bit about not RT-ing something that everyone and their brother has tweeted. I’ve started to think that way recently, but your affirmation helps me filter what I RT, and how I add value to that RT.
I both time my tweets strategically AND sometimes roll with things. For more casual tweets, I will tweet when my primary audience is sleeping and secondary audience picks it up. For the tweets I think add more value, I make sure to post it during my primary audience’s prime time. Sometimes I RT it then later, too.
@BrutusReport
Very useful information. TweatLater is a really good service. I had one small issue with them when I got a new twitter account a tried to register it and they made me wait 90 days cause someone else had previously registered the twitter account.
@Clueless Crafter
I try to time my tweets with the general topic trend that my followers seem to be interested in. So, if they’re talking about sex, let’s say, I’ll hold off on news about celibacy until the tides have turned.
Sorry for the visual;-)
@onviolence
Fairly simple advice, but good stuff.
@mrscwin
That is true – you have to be watchful and mindful of when people are retweeting. I also try to add extra when I retweet quotes. I love TweetLater, too! Excellent information!!
@Blogercise
You seem to contradict yourself, on one hand you suggest not becoming a slave to people’s tweets, but the next paragraph suggests we should become a slave to other people’s reading habits!
Personally I think this highlights a common problem – people treat twitter like an RSS feed, email or in some cases they want it to replace their own website! If you need to read every tweet to keep in the loop then you are probably following the wrong people and you are also setting yourself a very difficult (impossible?) challenge.
A case in point is big organisations who think twitter is the appropriate place to post updates on services. For example my train company posts up news on service delays. So are they expecting me to follow every tweet just in case one of them might actually be about my route? Or, I could just go to their website and look at the relevant page should I be interested in an update. Now there’s a crazy thought!
I think people are jumping on the twitter bandwagon without quite appreciating the transient nature of messages. If tweeting at the right time helps more people to see my message then that’s great – but I think I’d prefer to have people opted in to my mail out or subscribed to my RSS feed. Then I know that there is a message sitting there waiting for the next time they look, with twitter the message is lost quickly, very quickly in the case of some people!
@richardxthripp
This is good advice. I tweet whenever I feel like it and I don’t do @ tweets much. That must be why I have so few followers and get so little attention.
@retrocartoons
Haha thanks for the sound advice, I actually just started to use Twitter in order to boost my Alexa, I’ve been doing SEO for a few years but have quite a bit to learn, I’ll have to Tweet more often.
@revtrev
Great tips. I’ve found a few blogs that show when the best time is to send out your message. For my time zone it’s just a little after lunch and the early evening.
@Sixth_Sense_Mkt
This is great advice, we have been testing this for several months on Twitter and Facebook. The difference in traffic is amazing and surprising what different times generate different attention.
@cvin519
Thanks for this because I definitely sometimes tend to read almost every single tweet. It’s definitely a time waster sometimes so there will be days where I will just read a few tweets at a time.
However one thing I’d like to say is that I wouldn’t necessarily try to make EVERY tweet “valuable and worthwhile” that won’t waste your audience’s time. I say that because my standards for a good tweet will be different from other people. Something I find valuable might not be valuable to other people, so I think I will just be myself and tweet what I (and maybe others) will find interesting
@KriziaMissK
I was clueless about the “times” when you should be tweeting.
I will surely take that into consideration from now on when I tweet or re-tweet!
Thanks for this great information.
@Pimlico_flats
Blogercise – it’s an issue of Control.
The reason Twitter is successful is because it gives the reader control, unlike e-mail where the spammer takes over your Inbox. So what I am saying is that when you are a Twitter Reader you need to excercise that control to prevent Twitter sucking up your time.
The advice is different when you are a writer because you are no longer in control, you can’t force people to follow you, you can’t force followers to actually read what you are broadcasting. You are on the other side of the issue and need to use time to make your broadcasts as attractive as possible. There are other things you can do too – but my article was about time!