Studies show that for many Twitter users, Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. Wednesday and Friday have the second highest Twitter activity. Monday and Saturday are the slowest days. There are also general trends that people will check their Twitter accounts when they first get to work, at lunch time, and/or near the end of their work day.

Twitter is Global

Remember that your Twitter followers are likely from all around the world, so if you post to Twitter from Los Angeles on Wednesday at 12:00 noon,  it’s Wednesday 3PM in New York, Wednesday 8PM in London and Thursday 3AM in Beijing. If you’re trying to reach a certain geographic region, plan your posts to match high Twitter activity times in their timezone. A good free timezone tool is available at http://www.timeanddate.com/

Twitter Marketing Experiment: Find The Best Time For You To Tweet

Want to find out the best time for you to Tweet to get maximum exposure and/or clicks on your post links? Try an experiment by reposting a few different high-quality retweet-worthy twitter posts over a couple weeks — reposting them on, say, tuesday, wednesday, thursday and friday in the morning afternoon and evening — using a trackable url shortener system (ie bit.ly or hootsuite) to determine when your experimental posts are clicked on the most. Repeat the experiment a few times with different content and look for trends. Some suggest 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. You need to not overdo it and turn your readers off, so post carefully and don’t hesitate to ask your readers for feedback.

I’m posting this to my blog (which auto posts to my twitter account) at ~4pm on Tuesday. Lucky me.

Twitter Marketing 101: Ten Ways to use Twitter for Marketing & PR for your Company or Personal Brand

1. Get a Twitter Account. If you don’t have one already, visit Twitter.com and sign up for a free account. Think carefully about what your twitter account will be called as you can’t change it later and it should clearly represent your company or brand. 
2. Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy.  While most people just start randomly posting whatever comes to mind, you’ll be much more successful if you first sit down and write out your Twitter marketing plan including what types of things you’ll try to post about, how often you’ll post, how many followers you’ll try to reach, how your twittering will help you achieve your marketing goals, how your twittering fits into and compliments your overall offline and online marketing strategy, who you can get to help write/submit posts, etc.  Once you’ve got your Twitter marketing strategy nailed down then start posting to your twitter account. If you’re not sure where to start then consider hiring a Twitter Marketing Agency to help you create and /or implement your Twitter strategy.
3. Automate Blog Posting to Twitter. There are many great apps out there that enable you to automatically post your blog posts to your twitter account – so if you’re a blogger, consider feeding your Twitter account directly from your blog so you can hit two birds with one stone every time you create a new blog post. Your Twitter posts in this instance would then just link back to your full blog post, driving your followers into your blog, which is a good thing.  If you don’t have a blog, get one. If you don’t know where to start, consider creating your blog with  WordPress, as there are many great free Twitter WordPress plugins.
4. Make & Follow Twitter Friends . Don’t  only broadcast about yourself or your company, but take the social aspect of social media to heart and engage with others.  In your travels on the web you’ll find interesting websites that have links to personal or company twitter accounts. If you like what you see, follow them on twitter. To do this, visit a Twitter profile page then click the “follow” button.  Follow  influential bloggers and media and other noteworthy individuals in your industry. Often they’ll follow you back and you’ll have more success communicating with them via twitter than phone or email. 
5. Get your CEO Twittering.  Twitter offers CEO’s a great way to manage connections, share industry insights and network. Since Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters even busy CEOs can find time to post to their Twitter account from their iPhone or Blackberry while waiting at the airport. 
6. Offer Twitter Discounts. Consider broadcasting specials on your products or services to your Twitter followers. Take advantage of the viral nature of Twitter where valuable posts often become retweeted many times by many different users. Consider using a Twitter coupon service.
7. Provide Live Event Updates. If you’re holding a conference or seminar or any kind of event, Twitter live about it to generate interest, to post any last minute updates, etc. 
8. Get Involved and be a Contributor. Retweet  (repost) relevant posts made by those you’re following. Post links to great articles you or others have written.  Sometimes people will  follow you in return. To get started you can follow us on Twitter. 
9. Use URL shorteners. Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, so using a url shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com or others will enable you to write more in each post and have fewer characters used up by any URLs you link to in your post. Consider using a short URL service such as bit.ly that includes statistics tracking if you’re interested in seeing how many people click on the links you post.  Also consider using Hootsuite, an online Twitter Marketing software that enables you to post to multiple twitter accounts at once while also tracking your stats using their in-house short url ow.ly.
10. Pay Attention. Don’t just click the “follow” button on hundreds of other Twitter accounts, but actually read what others are saying. Do searches using Twitter Search for your own brand or product name to see what others are saying about you or your products or services and  interact when appropriate.

 Get your own custom twitter coffee cup at twitter mosaic by sxoop

 photo: abooth202

bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier. bit.ly can be accessed through our website, bookmarklets and a robust and open API. bit.ly is also integrated into several popular third-party tools such as Tweetdeck. A more full list of third party tools can be found on the bit.ly blog. Unique user-level and aggregate links are created, allowing users to view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location and metadata. Tracking stats are available after users shorten their long links with bit.ly by clicking on the “Info+” link on bit.ly, or just adding a “+” sign to the end of any bit.ly link (for example, http://bit.ly/n0og+).
Read full bit.ly article on NYTimes