Maybe I should have been a bit more technical and a little less Shakespearean with my title. The question is never whether you do or do not tweet at all, but rather how much do you Tweet, and is there a best day or time to send out your content? And what can we learn from where we have been?
I remember back in my early email marketing days where we would have binders upon binders of research we paid a college education worth on purchasing. These binders from Jupiter Media Metrix (anyone remember them?) to Gartner telling us the best time to send an email, the best day to send the email, how often to send the email, and various other details that have been stuffed in my brain. So as we find ourselves well into the midst of this social media revolution, there seems to be many similarities between email marketing and social media marketing strategies. Hence my question about when to tweet.
In my daily reading I have seen a few articles that speak to Friday at 4pm being the ultimate sweet spot to share your Twitter brilliance. But I live on the west coast, and I know that I want to appeal to the whole country and sometimes span the globe, so does this mean 4pm my time? When I type “best time to tweet” into Google, I get: About 21,100,000 results (0.32 seconds). Oh that’s all? Alright then, clearly some peps have some opinions!
Maybe we need to take a step back and think about what goals we are looking to achieve with our Twitter strategy. Are we looking to increase our followers more than anything? Maybe we want to be added to a certain number of lists? As with all new mediums, and clearly with social media, testing, testing, and more testing is the best way to find each of our own sweet spots. I think first and foremost what matters is the quality and the authenticity of the content. It won’t matter if you are tweeting every ten seconds if what you are saying is not worth the 140 characters you just spent.
Here is my rule of thumb, I tweet if the content is something that I feel is share-worthy. Anything else I scrap. Maybe this is too harsh and perhaps I need to be a bit more lenient on my content. I do not have a certain time of day, or a certain amount of tweets I feel I need to send. But maybe I am wrong, and maybe my strategy could use some adjusting. So I am opening up the question to you, when do you tweet? What do you tweet? Why do you tweet? How do you chose what you tweet? And please tweet me about it!
