What time of day do web analysts tweet?

Thanks to @menggoh (and Virgin America‘s wi-fi) I have been thoroughly entertained on a red eye between LA and Boston with Twitter analytics from The Archivist. Which means naturally, I was curious: based on when the web analytics community is active and tweeting (based on tweets to the #measure hashtag) when is a good time of day for me to post new blog posts?

The cool thing about The Archivist is that they give you tons of fancy charts about who the top users our, our daily tweet volume over the past few months, topics discussed etc. (Seriously, check it out – so much fun!) However, what I couldn’t find was a breakdown of total tweets by time of day. The even cooler thing about The Archivist is that they allow you to download an Excel file of the data. (Insert cry of geek joy here!) So naturally, I took the data and DIY’ed it.

So as it turns out, the peak of #measure tweets is between 6-7 pm. We’re primarily an evening/night owl community (insert HootSuite joke, anyone? Get it? Owl? Hoot? My apologies – I blame the red eye flight…) with much lower activity in the morning. Possibly we work on being a peaceful community by waiting for the coffee to set in before communicating too much!

Here is total tweet volume to the #measure hashtag for 5/11 through 7/2/10.
[Ideally, I’d like to overlap total tweet volume to see whether we follow the overall Twitter trends. I’ll update when I have further data.]

*Note: Time of day is based on United States EST

So what does this tell me? I theorize that I probably don’t want to post my tweets at 6pm, right when a huge volume of tweets are flooding in (too easy to be missed in the midst.) However, perhaps noon/1pm would be a good time, so my tweet is recently posted as we start getting more active on Twitter for the day.

Now, I’m off to test some time-of-day theories …

[This adventure in geekdom was proudly brought to you by The Archivist and Virgin America‘s wi-fi service.]

4 thoughts on “What time of day do web analysts tweet?

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  2. Jonny – no I believe that (surprise surprise) the time of data is based on US time. I’m going to guess either PST or EST – the data file doesn’t indicate time zone; need to follow up. So, I’d argue that if you are in London, you would want to see what time of day our 4pm is (for example.) You’re probably one of the people tweeting “at 3am” except of course it’s not 3am for you!

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