Twitter Tips: Using Followerwonk to Know When to Tweet

I recently told you about the benefits of using Buffer to schedule your tweets (and posts on other social media platforms) so that they can be automatically sent out when you aren't online. As helpful as Buffer is, there is one very important thing it doesn't do: tell you when to schedule your tweets for maximum benefit. It gives you the flexibility of having your tweets sent out at various times of day, but you have to determine which times of day to use. If only there was a way to identify the times of day when your Twitter followers were most active. This would make sure your tweets were going out to maximum exposure.

The good news is that there is a free service that will show you when your Twitter followers are most active, making it easy to schedule your tweets in Buffer (or whichever alternative service you prefer) for times of peak exposure: Followerwonk.

It took me a couple of attempts to figure out how to get Followerwonk to do what I wanted it to do, so I'll try to make it as easy as possible for you:

1. Login to Followerwonk using your Twitter account, authorizing them to work together.
2. Click the Analyze tab.
3. In the blank box with the gold symbol in it, enter your Twitter username without the @ sign in front of it.





4. In the pull-down box to the right of this, select "analyze their followers" and click the orange "Do it" button.
5. Followerwonk will then process the data, creating a report for you that will show up under the "Followerwonk Reports" link under your avatar at the top right corner of the page.
6. The report gives you quite a lot of interesting information about your followers, but the crucial section is the most active hours of your followers.

Here's what mine looked like in the report I ran last month:

This graph shows me when my Twitter followers are tweeting. Armed with this information, I can set up my schedule in Buffer using the times of day when my followers are most likely to be active on Twitter. Since the times when I am most active on Twitter are almost never the same times my followers are most active, this makes it more likely that they will see my tweets.