When should we tweet?

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

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