Ever wonder why some of your tweets make more of an impact than others? Sure, we all do!
Do you know why?
Don’t just quickly answer YES, because I’m about to ask you to tell me. Hmm…need to time to think?
You probably thought of one or more of the following:
- It depends on the headline or what you’re tweeting
- It depends on the time of day or night when you’re tweeting
- It depends how many of your followers are online at the same time and paying attention
- It depends on how many lists you’re on that people can go back to and check for missed tweets
- It depends on how many followers you have
- It depends on how many of your followers are active or “engage”
- It depends on your Klout score or your online “influence” – think again!
- The list of “it depends“ goes on…
Am I right?
Looks like we think alike :D. But have you ever taken the time to analyze when your tweets have the most impact? As in Dan Zarrella style?
In all honesty, neither have I. My assumptions are simply based on common sense or educated guesses.
I pretty much tweet whenever I have something to share or say to someone. Basically, whenever I want or have time. But once in a while, I manually schedule a tweet or two with Hootsuite to go out while I”m away. You see, when I go to bed, most of my blogger friends are just finishing dinner. And believe me when I tell ya, I’m usually up till the wee hours of the night. Damn time difference sleeping habits!
Enter Timely
According to Sysomos, roughly 71% of tweets are ignored or get no response from the twitterverse.
Well, there’s this relatively new web application from the good people at Flowtown called Timely.is. Have you heard of it? Cause I hadn’t till now and I’m quite the fan of Flowtown’s work.
It seems that Timely helps you schedule up to 9 tweets per day so that they have maximum impact. Basically, they find the best or “right” time for your tweets so that:
- They have an audience
- They have the biggest potential of being retweeted
How Does it Work?
As your Twitter account changes and your following grows, Timely automatically adjusts accordingly and provides you with new predictions. Heck, I wish they made an application that could tell me when the money train was passing by!
You’re allowed as many Twitter accounts as you like and you can also invite an unlimited amount of collaborators to work on the same account. Meaning – if more than one friend or colleague manage the same account, they can all work together.
Now, I could get into the details by regurgitating what the Timely folks say or I could simply provide you with this self-explanatory screenshot from their website.
My Ramblings Thoughts
Sounds pretty simple eh? Yes and no, I suppose. But I”m not much of a techie. However, I would have preferred that the system base its analyses on a little more that 199 tweets.
According to TweetStats, I tweet about 33 times a day. I’m not sure how accurate this is but if that’s the case, then Timely would be basing its predictions on my last 6 days of tweeting. Granted, each person has their own ‘twythm‘, but I’m assuming that many if not most of the folks who would consider scheduling a few tweets (or already do) or who’d want to know when to target their tweets, would be avid Twitter users – so they may want to have their results based on more than a few days worth of activity. Just my 2 cents.
Anyhow, I think I’ve analyzed this more than I should have so let’s just see how it goes for now.
I only signed up yesterday and I wanted to try it out for myself to see how well it works. The good thing is that it provides you with a basic performance metric that displays each tweet along with the clicks it received, the number of times it was retweeted and its overall reach.
Hmm…better luck on the next batch ;). Shoot, now I might have to convince you that I do get retweeted every so often lol.
You can also see the articles that are waiting to be tweeted and can push them up to so that they can trade times with the first one in line.
I think a little drag and drop option would have been pretty neat here. It would give you a little more control and would make switching tweets (all while keeping the same times that were advised) more practical than with the “Move to Top” option you see now. Not sure if that would screw things up or not but just another of my 2 cents worth.
Anyhow, this is still my first day of trial but I think it’s an interesting tool to try out and do a little research with to get an idea of when you’re getting your strongest responses. So if you haven’t already, do give Timely a go and see when your tweets are golden because all in all, the concept is quite clever and easy to use. Plus, it’s absolutely free (unless you upgrade to the pro version), and you’ve got nothing to lose!
In the long run though, I’m not sure whether I’ll keep using it or not. So far I’m happy having everything under one platform – it just makes my life easier. But I’m definitely curious to see the results from this experiment so I”m at least giving it a week or so. You never know – I could always be persuaded.
Have you tried Timely?
Were the results what you hoped for?
How accurate do you think this tool is?
Do you now have a better idea of when to tweet your posts or other?
I’d love to hear your review on this tool if you’ve used it and even what you think if you haven’t.
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