As you build your business or your blog have you ever wondered, “Why didn’t that tweet get any attention? No one responded to my post on Facebook, I wonder why?” Well, if you haven’t good for you. I certainly have. The timing issue of posting can be one frustrating topic. Today we will take a look at some ideas to drive the most traffic to your updates, solely based on when you post. Let me first say that EVERY business, blog, and niche is different. What might be the optimal time for one is not for another. I strongly encourage each of you to take 15-30 days and pull together that data after that time.  Use an Excel spreadsheet and track how often your post gets an impression. The great thing about Facebook is they have this handy tab called “Insights”. This will show what posts got the most impressions.

With regards to Twitter, if you use a 3^rd party tool like Hootsuite (I do) you can actually create reports and summaries of how your links were received. So, for example if you wanted to stick to 1 time of day for delivering content, Twitter could tell you how many times that link was clicked. You can tell pretty fast if that time of day is poor or good.

Let’s talk about Facebook first.

Regardless of your business, blog or niche you should be posting every single day. You want your “stuff” in the streams of your friends and fans as often as possible without being obnoxious. Mind you that line can be pretty blurry at times.

Mashable had an excellent article in October talking about that very topic. You can read the entire article here. Jeff Widman, co-founded PageLever. When asked how frequently or when should status updates be posted he answered, Post whenever the most recent status update for your page stops showing up in your fans’ news feeds.

That makes sense, right? Not for most of us.

But, Jeff has given a real way to measure this. He says, Post a status update. Every hour, record the number of impressions, likes and comments. Figure out when the rate of new impressions or likes slows down.

You could do this for 2 days and probably get a great idea of when your fans are reading your updates.

Consider spacing your updates out throughout the day. Here are 3 key times for most brands, for most reach.

• Early Morning
• Early Evening/After work
• Late night

Consider the day of the week as well. This is when your niche really comes into play. If you are all about entertainment, Thursday through Sunday would be huge. People are making plans and they are look for advice. However, if you are in retails studies show engagement is at its highest on Sundays.

Let’s talk about Twitter now.

Many people say the best time to tweet is 9am pst. And here is why. You are hitting a sweet spot for availability. Look at this way.

9am pst = 11am cst & 12pm est. Lunchtime! People are freely perusing their twitter streams and are catching your message.

9am pst is the start of the work day on the west coast and Canada.

Plus, if you have international business 9am pst hangs nicely as the end of the business day in England. 5pm

Now we all want our message seen on Twitter but what is even better than that? Well, being Re-tweeted of course! A good time to get re-tweeted is 4pm to 10p est.

A cool tool to check when your tweets are most impactful is Timely. What the online tool does is schedule your tweets for THE most effective time. That way you get more mentions, more RT.

There is a fantastic article over at The Next Web showing an infographic on when to tweet.  12 pm & 6pm are the best times to tweet. Their graphs show us that 5pm est. is the best time to get a RT. They cite the best days to tweet are midweek and weekends. Finally, they say best tweeting frequency is 1-4 tweets per hour.

Tags: Facebook, impressions, insights, Twitter