So you’ve done everything right. You’ve created your perfect Twitter profile, found an awesome picture to represent who you are, and are engaging with people like crazy. Now you you’re beginning to have a following, but are they seeing your tweets? Not everyone is as interactive and engaging as you, or lives on the internet.

How can you maximize the potential reach of your tweets? The answer: proper timing of tweets. You’ve heard it in the business world your whole life, “timing is everything,” and it applies to your tweets as well. While it may seem like most Twitter activity is going on all day during business hours, that’s just the activity of who you follow, not who is following you. In order to get your tweets seen, you need to tweet when your followers are on, otherwise they’ll just get lost in the massive Twitter feed on your followers page.

Here are a few tips on how to accomplish the perfectly timed Tweet:

1. Research your audience. Is your following a bunch of computer engineers writing code until 4am? If so, it’s probably not best to tweet in the morning when they’re sleeping. Or is your following a typical business person doing the nine to five grind every day? In this case, your best time to tweet may be before nine, and after five.


2. Use available social media tools. There are hundreds of tools out there to help you find out who your audience is. For timing, there’s one in particular that helps you optimize the timing of your tweets named Timely. This application grabs data from your last tweets, and from your following, to calculate the best times for you to tweet so they have the highest impact. You can sign up for the application (it’s free) or you can simply type in your twitter name on their website for a quick list of higher impact tweets. Signing up for the service gives Timely more data to calculate more effective times for you to tweet.


3. Scheduling tweets. Now that you’ve researched your audience, and have the science of Timely backing your tweets, it’s time to schedule some tweets. If a high impact time for you to be tweeting is at 3am, you’re not going to want to wake up every night at 3am to send out a tweet. You can schedule your tweets in the Timely app mentioned above, or you can use many other services such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to schedule your tweets. Scheduling your tweets will let you write out all your tweets at the beginning of the day, save you time, and ensure they’ll be sent with maximum impact.

Of course you should always keep engaging and contributing valuable content to the Twitterverse on a regular basis. Using these tips are just a few more marketing weapons for you to optimize your efforts of having your message seen across Twitter, which will in turn generate a larger following.

- Spencer Tucci