On Twitter, Timing is Everything

Twitter is a medium of the moment. The life-span of a tweet is exceedingly short.  If a tweet it is not read quickly after being posted, chances are that it won’t be read at all. The lifetime of a tweet appears to be social media’s answer to the mayfly.

In one of my previous posts, I examined the question “When is the best time of day to tweet?”. It turned out that there was no one universal answer to that question. The best time to tweet depended on what time of day your particular set of followers were active on Twitter.  Recent evidence regarding Twitter usage patterns illustrates exactly how important it is to time your tweets so that you are reaching as large and audience as possible.

So what is the effective lifetime of a tweet? Sysomos, a leading provider of social media monitoring and analytics technology, analyzed 1.2 billion tweets to find out how many of them generated some sort of reaction. The key points from the Sysomos analysis:

• 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published. Thus, if your Tweet is not retweeted in the first hour after it is posted, it probably won’t be.
• 96.9% of @ replies happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published
• 23% of tweets generate replies, while 6% generate retweets.
• Of all tweets that generated a reply, 85% have only one reply. Another 10.7% attracted a reply to the original reply – the conversation was two levels deep. Only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are three levels deep.

The following graph summarizes these important findings:

Like many things in life, on Twitter, timing is everything. If you want your message to be read, to engage your audience, and to be retweeted, you need to know when your followers are online. Every group of followers is different in terms of the periods of peak activity during the day. Remember that:

• A single tweet will only reach a fraction of your followers.
• By analyzing the times during which your followers tweet, it is possible to develop a strategy to predict the percentage of your followers that you can reach with multiple tweets.
• It is also possible to determine the best times of day for multiple tweets. Note that the muliple tweets don’t necessarily have to take place during one day; they can be spread out over several days so as not to annoy your most attentive followers.