Hi everyone,
I recently got involved with managing the @gnome Twitter account again. In
doing so, I was pleased to see that there was a decent amount of recent
activity. However, this came as a bit of a surprise: despite following
@gnome, I hadn't seen any of our recent posts.
This got me thinking about the times that we tweet. It's so easy to miss a
tweet, and tweeting at certain times will obviously reach some time zones
more than others. If you search the web, there's plenty of advice about
this. Repeating tweets on different days and at different times is
recommended as a way of increasing readership and reaching different time
zones.
I've experimenting a little with potential timings for our tweets.
Generally speaking, afternoon on work days is considered the best time to
post. To reach audiences from East Coast USA right across to Asia and
Oceania it's necessary to post each message three times at eight hour
intervals. The following time slots seem to work best: 4:00-6:00,
12:00-14:00, 19:00-21:00 UTC.
There are dangers with repeating tweets, of course. If we repeat too much,
it will start to get annoying and look like spam. It also raises the
possibility of bloopers. However, I think we can minimize these issues by
taking the following steps:
- Instead of repeating the same post exactly, try to rephrase it each
time. In addition to simple rewording, this can be done by:
- Acknowledging that it's recycled news (for example: "In case you
missed the news...").
- Combining pieces of news into recaps or digests ("This latest
announcement is our third this month", "Our new partner X joins
partners Y
and X").
- If the post isn't urgent, leave a pause of a day or two between the
same post being published in each different time zone.
- When tweeting about a live event, subsequent repostings should be put
in the past tense.
- When targeting specific locations, there's no need to repeat in
different time zones. For example, "Join us at our event in Berlin" should
only be targeted at Western Europe.
How does that sound? Any ideas how to improve on this plan? I am a little
concerned about the work involved in doing this, so it might be good to try
and think about a less comprehensive/detailed plan.
Allan
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