Time your Tweets for Maximum Impact

Recently, we ran a Twitter campaign to recruit participants for an Open Innovation workshop. Our client wanted to attract final year undergraduates.

We didn’t know what would be the best time to Tweet to reach this target audience. So we ran an experiment. We Tweeted at different times for two weeks and we monitored the number of people who enrolled in the workshop as the Tweet campaign progressed.

Tweets sent from Monday to Saturday during the day and in the evenings resulted in a steady enrollment for the workshop. However, Tweets on Friday evenings got absolutely no response. I guess we should have realised that students have other things to do on Friday nights!

There was a huge increase in enrollment when we Tweeted on Sundays. In the end the Tweets sent on Sunday recruited nearly 25% of the participants for the workshop.

I hadn’t expected Tweets on a Sunday to be so effective. We don’t know why this worked so well for this target audience. Perhaps, final year graduates are busy studying during the week and Sunday is the day when they have time to catch up and do other things.

So when you are Tweeting, consider when to send your Tweets. Time your Tweets to reach your target audience when they are most receptive. If you regularly target the same people you will build up experience of the best times. If you are targeting a new audience it’s good to experiment. Send Tweets at different times and monitor the response.

Of course the time a Tweet is sent is just one factor that can influence it’s impact, but it is an important thing to consider and experiment with. Sometimes the results can be unexpected.

Do you have any experience of unusual factors affecting the success of your Tweets?  If you do, please let me know.