Timing your Tweets
With tweets often disappearing faster than free BrightonSEO tickets it’s essential that an organic tweet hits your followers at the perfect moment.
Our tool of choice for working out the right time is Moz’s Followerwonk. Using their ‘Analyze’ option add in any Twitter handle, choose to ‘analyze their followers’ and there you have it, a complete 24 hour graph of the most active times your followers are browsing.
For @brightonseo this means between 10am-12pm plus 4-5pm are going to be good, but that quickly drops off come home time post 5pm.
What you also need to know…
- Using Buffer? Then you can sync Followerwonk timings to giving you the exact minute, rather than the hour which are more popular.
- The ‘peak’ between 4-5pm only represents just over 7% of the followers for @brightonseo. If this happens to you then why not repeat your tweets at multiple times of the day to maximise coverage across different parts of your audience?
- These graphs change – a lot. As followers join or leave your times will adjust. Keep an eye on how things fluctuate and adapt accordingly.
Finding Affinity on Facebook
With EdgeRank bleeding organic reach dry, finding the best times to publish your posts is becoming ever more critical; unless you have an unlimited budget to keep paying of course.
Thankfully Facebook’s Insights provide part of the answer.
Head to your pages Insights and under the ‘Posts’ tab and you’ll be presented with a graph of ‘When your fans are online…’
So in this instance posting around 9pm would be much preferred compared to 9am.
What you also need to know…
- Facebook only shows data from the last 7 days, so as with Followerwonk keep checking back to see how you may need to adjust your scheduling.
- Seeing increased activity on Facebook come the evenings is nothing new. If your fans are more active then chances are that your competitors are too. Posting a few hours earlier may mean a slightly smaller number of active fans, but less competition may mean there’s more chance of your posts actually reaching your intended audience.
Finding Instagram’s #primetime
With the good old days of chronological feeds slowing fading, timing posts is going to become ever more important as algorithms similar to Facebook’s EdgeRank take hold.
Thankfully, Buffer has a solution.
Launched in July, Buffer now integrates with Instagram (nothing new on that front – Hootsuite got there almost a year before). However, what Buffer does offer is the chance to organise previous posts via their analytics to pull out the ‘Most Popular’ posts (made from a combination of likes and comments).
Just log in, hook up your Instagram account and hit ‘Analytics’ to begin.
You’ll need a paid account to do this but it means you can compare what’s popular with the times you scheduled posts and start picking out trends.
#winning
What you also need to know…
- What this does mean is that Buffer can’t analyse your audience in the same way as Followerwonk and Facebook. Instead it’s going to be a time-intensive process cross-referencing times to work out what’s best – but still better than randomly hitting the share button.
- With the worldwide rollout of official Instagram Analytics before the years out, this sort of data should become a lot more accessible within Instagram for free.
On your marks, set, go!
So, there you have it. 3 tools for 3 channels; all to hopefully point you in the right direction and get your timings on track.
As digital marketers we put crazy levels of effort into idea planning, copywriting, image sourcing and editing for social. Yet when it comes to scheduling simply pushing something live based on hunches or outdated online advice should never be the case. So, experiment, test, learn and adapt to see what works for your audience.
Tweet me with your thoughts – but just make sure it’s at an optimised time at @danwht
