Twitter Tools: TweetWhen, Timely & When To Tweet?

I hadn't realized that there are a variety of tools designed to tell you when it's best to tweet on Twitter until quite recently. So I'm starting to evaluate some of them, including TweetWhen, Timely and When to tweet? in this post, while also searching for more resources like Dan Zarella's research on when it's best to post on Twitter and Facebook and when it's best to send email and post on blogs.

Since Dan Zarella was a starting point for this topic, TweetWhen, a tool powered by his employers at HubSpot, is a good place to start. TweetWhen is a very simple tool that shows you two charts based on when you get the most retweets per tweet, one for the time of day and one for the time of week, and then suggests a single day and time as best. That's a bit simplistic, however the charts give activity throughout the day and week so that provides a bit more to consider.

Timely was actually the first tool I heard about. One's initial query gives four times of day that should be best for tweeting. More analytics are available if you start using it to post your tweets but the idea is that you enter your tweets and then they will start to auto-schedule posts for you. If that fits your approach then Timely is worth a look, though there have been some concerns about downtime given that the service takes over your tweeting process.

When To Tweet? is similar to TweetWhen in the simplicity of its results but, rather than basing its chart and recommendation on when you get retweets, it focuses on when your followers are tweeting. It then gives you a recommendation of when to tweet based on the peak of that activity and an overall graph of that activity featuring time of day. It would be great if they also offered day of the week with a graph of the week's activity by your followers.

Overall I'd say that the ideal would be a combination of Tweetwhen and When to tweet?, based on their use of different data sets, so trying both and seeing how the charts compare is where I would go next with these services. All three services are free, though TweetWhen plans to offer a PRO version that analyzes more data. I'll be keeping an eye on that but feel that without including day of the week, it remains a limited offering.

I'm checking out other services as I find them, if you have one to recommend, please post in the comments or contact me at: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.