Do it yourselfers know that social media sites like Twitter can be very helpful to anyone who is trying to increase traffic  and readership.  Syndicating content to Twitter is relatively simple, and although many of the people who see your tweet are not new readers, when they retweet you (RT) now your link is appearing in front of hundreds, perhaps thousands of new eyeballs.  RT’s are the real power on twitter and to take full advantage of them you need followers, and timing.  Writing tweets may be an art, however deciding when to tweet them is a science.  To prove the science behind twitter, in an article on Fast Company[1], viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million RT’s.  The findings are pretty clear, and with a little bit of planning you can increase your RT’s, and subsequently increase traffic to your site.

This first graph from Fast Company shows you the RT curve throughout the day.  As you can see, their research revealed that the likliehood of your tweet getting RT’d varies greatly throughout the day, so plan around this.  If you live on the West coast keep in mind that these times are EST, so plan accordingly.  When Fast Company switched their attention from time of day to day of week, they again found a very strong pattern of RT’s. The bottom graph shows you the number of RT’s based on day of the week.  Fridays see the highest number of RT’s, perhaps they are checking out of work early and spending more time on twitter. Regardless, this is your prime time to Tweet.  While you can’t wait until Friday to send out all of your tweets, if you are planning a post, or if your a business who is preparing to make an announcement, think about pushing your release out on Friday.  Although the peak RT time lasts from about 3-6pm, remember that people are RTing a lot during this period, so try to get your tweet out ahead of the wave, and utilize the full potential of this RT window.

[1] The original Fast Company Article