From Dan Zarella: Learning to Tweet When No One Else is Talking
April 30th, 2012 | 
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Timing your activity on Twitter can make a huge difference in the type of exposure you receive. Understanding the best time to engage your audience is important, but there are different points on when to share. Dan Zarella just discussed a new strategy he calls contra-competitive tweeting. What is he referring to? Contra-competitive tweeting is using Twitter when no one else is to get more exposure and retweets.
I have heard that the best time to get exposure for my tweets was during certain sweet points. Three years ago, I read a post from Pear Analytics that talked about the best times to send a tweet to Twitter. I even wrote a post about this in Young Entrepreneur last year. This study claimed that the best time to get exposure on Twitter was at 12:30 and the best day of the week was on Monday.
I believed every word of this advice. Pear Analytics did a very thorough study and I definitely look at quantitative data. However, Dan’s data showed that following Pear Analytics data could be completely wrong.
Wait for Your Competitors to Shut Up
Dan’s research found that the best time to send a tweet was when no one else was talking. When you first hear this, it is understandably a little counter-intuitive. On the one, hand it seems like you would get more tweets when you don’t have to shout to make your voice heard with caps or extra hashtags (which can be annoying to your followers). On the other hand, wouldn’t these “dead” times be the times when no one else is listening?
Maybe not. After reading Dan’s post, I started wondering about something. How many hours do people spend on Facebook. I know friends who are on Facebook several hours a day. However, they aren’t always posting. There seem to be certain times when people just want to watch from the sidelines.
Maybe Dan has noticed a piece of human nature exhibited through social media. Many people can’t be the person who is always jumping in and starting a new conversation. We’ve probably all seen this at parties or other events we’ve been to. Some people are just tired from work or in a place where they aren’t in a mood to set things into motion. Instead, they just wait for someone else to get the ball rolling.
Maybe the reason Dan gets more retweets on Saturdays is because that is the time people just feel like watching what’s going on. Maybe they are too exhausted from the work week or hung over from a late Friday night to be an active Twitter user. However, they may be passively be idling their time, waiting for someone else to share the next cool tip or funny link. When they see it, they just have to click the retweet button.
Dan is something of a social media guru. If this man talks, I end up listening to what he has to say. Maybe I will need to start scheduling my tweets at different times.
Have you had any luck with the contra-positive tweeting Dan talks about?
Kalen Smith is the Founder of Online Rookies and Engineer-a-Business. He holds degrees in mechanical engineering and an MBA. However, his true passion has always been IT and Internet marketing. You can find him on Twitter at Engineerbiz.
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I’ve found Saturday to be great for views on blogs and posts on FB so I’d imagine Twitter to be as well. I find Fridays to be huge on Twitter with #FF. Follow Friday is like a party every Friday there. It does die down in the evening. Like you said, everyone is too tired. I like using the buffer with Social Bro which calculates your best time for tweeting.
Thanks for the feedback Lisa! I had noticed that I’ve gotten higher page views on Saturdays too. It kind of made sense, since more people have idle time. I didn’t think about the Follow Friday part, but that makes a lot of sense too! Thanks again for the share!
Kalen,
Great post and Dan definitely knows his stuff. The contra-competitive tweeting is very interesting. Think a lot of it has to do with the amount of time that your post is actually in view in lists and in the normal timeline.
I definitely see more emails conversions on Saturday (and at night). That also makes me think that it also may be a trust thing (when it comes to email at least) since most people are trying to sell to their list during the morning and daytime, an email at night doesn’t put folks on the defensive as much.
Love the post!
Thank you Dean! I am glad to hear about your results. This is the kind of information that people really need to hear. I would like to talk with you about that in more detail sometime. The other readers could learn a lot from you!