Blog Archives
Is it Twitter o’clock?: When is the best time to tweet?
Twitter’s great when people can see what you’re sharing, but the harsh reality is that most of your twitter followers won’t ever see or read your latest tweet. Only those that are online and paying attention to Twitter when you send it are likely to see your musings. Plus, of course, anyone who finds your content through other means like a search on Twitter or Bing, scrolling through their Twitter archive (who has time for this?) or sees a retweet from someone else.
That’s why eager Twitter users are often interested in finding out when their followers are most likely to be online so they can maximise their reach and ensure their precious 140 characters don’t disappear into a lonely echo chamber.
Tweriod is a great tool for gaining this sort of insight. After logging in, Tweriod can analyse the activities of your last 5,000 followers and tell you precisely when you should tweet to gain the most exposure. As they explain on their website:
Tweriod is a free twitter tool that helps you make the most of Twitter by letting you know the best time to tweet.
There are graphs showing when you get the most @ replies by day and hour of the day, as well as advice on what times of day your tweets are most likely to gain the highest exposure. For me, it’s between 7-8am and 7-9pm, but your mileage may vary.
Remember, of course, that past activity is no guarantee of future behaviour so you shouldn’t take Tweriod’s recommendation’s too seriously. But it’s certainly a great way to analyse your followers’ behaviour and spot some simple changes you can introduce to greatly improve the effectiveness of your Twitter activity.
Give Tweriod a spin at www.tweriod.com and please let me know what you discover.
News Flash: our news habits are changing
Gosh, these data bring things into sharp focus! We all know that our information discovery and consumption habits are going through some pretty seismic changes, but new data from the Pew Research Center in the US show how rapidly this change has come about.
In 2010, the Internet surpassed TV as the main source of news information for 18-29 year olds in the US, while 48% of 30-49 year olds also cited the Internet as one of their two main news sources. The use of newspapers remains in decline across most age categories, while radio seems to be holding its own, albeit at a low point of between 13-19%.
[click graphs to enlarge]
There’s a whole generation of consumers who have recently or are about to enter the workforce whose news consumption behaviours differ wildly to every generation that has gone before. Over the coming years, as these consumers grow older and become the group with the highest disposable income, the way news and information are discovered and shared will undergo further transformations. The challenge for marketers and anyone in the content creation business is huge. These data provide us with a compelling and undeniable truth: the future’s digital.
