Twitter can be an effective traffic driving tool, but the simple truth is that it has little (if any) value if you're trying to promote your content at a time of day when your target audience is inactive.
Since I'm starting to post on this site regularly and the majority of my content appeals to SEOs, I wanted to learn when the community was most active on Twitter. My assumption was that if I knew when people were using Twitter, I could tweet my new content at times that would give it the best chances of being retweeted, read, and shared.
The results of the study are pretty interesting, so I thought I'd share it with the rest of the SEO community.
Aggregated Tweets
To start out, I identified 30 SEOs who have a lot of influence on me personally. Then I wrote a little script that wrote roughly 22,000 of their tweets (with timestamps) to CSV, so I could map out their Twitter activity.
You can see the visualization of this aggregated data in the bubble chart below (as you can see, weekdays between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM appear to be the most consistently active times).
Tweets by Individuals
While the aggregate view is great, sometimes when I tweet a new piece of content, I know that it will only be of potential interest to a small subset of people. For example, I know that someone like Ross Hudgens is fairly likely to retweet an article about scalable linkbuilding, while Aaron Wall is likely to retweet anything that calls out Google for abusing its authority.
In these cases, I want to make sure that I tweet my content when the most interested parties have the best chances of seeing it. Below, I've put together information detailing when some of the most influential SEOs tweet, so that you can get your content front of the right people (again, all times are EST).
Danny Sullivan
Location: Newport Beach, Orange County
Time Zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Bio: Editor of SearchEngineLand.com, covering Google, SEO, PPC and all aspects of search engines and search marketing.
Rand Fishkin
Location: Seattle, WA
Time Zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Bio: CEO + founder of SEOmoz. I tweet 50-75X/week primarily on inbound marketing, SEO, startups & entrepreneurship.
