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Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

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?