Best Times to Tweet – Industry Averages or Specific To Your Audience?

Last week I was thrilled to see the latest social stat from Dan Zarrella on How to Get More Clicks on Twitter. Always looking for ways to increase my reach I have been testing some new tools both from a queue/timing perspective as well as digging into the analytics specific to my follower base. I was interested to see after bumping Dan's stats up again my actual performance that while many of the best times to tweet were similar, my best reach came at slightly different time because of when my audience was online. The most amount of my followers are online Monday and Thursday at 10am PST (denoted below by the black dots)

While online time did impact reach a bit, the majority of my replies and RT's came at different hours. Monday at 10am - no replies or RT even though most of my followers are online, ditto with Thursday. Wednesday between 12-2pm was the best and look at the weekend Fri-Sun - 6pm to Midnight were the hot times.

More Valuable Replies, RT's or CTR? When looking at Twitter performance I'm looking not only at the replies and RT's but also who clicked through on the links. Below is the previous weeks click-data while Wednesday was the best day for replies and RT's it was one of the lowest for click-throughs, the weekends again killed it for CTR. While Sunday is one of the lowest days for audience online, it tends to be the audience that RT's and clicks on my links the most. What is Next? My best times are determined by two key measures: the performance of past tweets and when most of my followers will be online. I'll be changing some of the buffering tools I use to tweet armed with this new data and see if I can get my replies or retweets to increase. I look at this data weekly to see how changes in schedule do or don't impact reach and response.

What are you doing to optimize your Twitter marketing?