What’s the best time to reach your followers on Twitter? When they’re awake of course. But that’s easier said than done. Don’t assume that all your followers are in your time zone. Twitter is global. Most of my followers are in the USA and Canada, although I do have a significant number in Europe, the Far East, Australia and some in the Middle East. So one tweet is going to catch some awake and some asleep. Of those awake, some will be at work and some at home. If I just tweet in the evening, I will only reach a particular subset of my global followers, mostly in the USA. Here’s a map showing world time when it’s 7pm in the UK. As you can see, the USA is wide awake while Australia is asleep or just waking.

Map credit: www.worldtimezone.com

Now here’s a couple of tweets from problogger last Friday afternoon (in Australia) on a very important subject:

As you can see, while it was 3.40pm in eastern Australia, the time in the UK was 4.40am – definitely not beer o’clock for me! In fact, when it was my beer o’clock, Darren I’m sure was safely tucked up in bed.

Of course there are different types of tweet. ‘What I am doing just now’ is just that and it’s tweeted once. But if you have some important content to get out to your followers, for example a really good link you’ve found or a new blog post, you’ll probably have to retweet the message. Having said that, I am currently following about 130 people and I still make a point of reading every tweet. That’s the beauty of Twitter. You can quickly scan each tweet and see if it’s of interest and worth responding to. However, as I follow more and more people, there will come a time soon when I’ll have to follow groups of people more closely with TweetDeck and just dip into the rest when I have time.

So to maximize my chance of a tweet being read by someone who doesn’t have me in a group on TweetDeck, and who is following lots of people, and also to deal with the global nature of Twitter, I find it’s worth repeating important tweets up to 4 times in about 18 hours. Typically, that would be evening, late evening, next morning and then the afternoon. Hopefully, that will catch the different audiences. But that’s enough, I don’t want to turn anyone off.

This from Guy Kawasaki

Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweets.

Many people are restricted from using Twitter and other social networking applications at work so it might be worth retweeting so as to catch your followers in the evening,  or even at the weekend for those that have more time to relax and catch up with the twittosphere then.

I also find it’s worth repeating any important weekend tweets on a Monday evening in case they weren’t picked up at the weekend.