If no one’s around to read your tweet, does it make a sound? Well, no – so you should probably start using Twitter when you know that your followers are paying attention. Working with the newly-branded Moz (formally known as SEOMoz), Buffer is rethinking tweet optimization and adding smarts to its platform with the help of Moz’s FollowerWonk app.
The idea here is simple. FollowerWonk will analyze your Twitter followers to figure out what time of the day they are the most active. With that data, Buffer can schedule tweets accordingly to maximize their visibility.
Analyzing your followers and setting up your tweets is even simpler. Go to FollowerWonk’s website and at the top of the page, click on “Analyze Followers.” The service is free and you won’t be required to sign up for anything in order to use the service. Type your username in the left-hand form and click on the dropdown option next to the form. The option should show “analyze users they follow” by default. Just click on this and select “analyze their followers.” Then click “Do it.”
You’ll get a nice list of graphs showing you what type of people follow you, when they’re active, and where your followers are. But what you need to schedule your tweets is under the bar graph displaying the “Most active hours for francisybea’s followers.” You’ll see a yellow button labeled “Sign in with Twitter.” Click on this. You’ll need to sign up for a Buffer account to use this part of the feature.
Select how many times a day you’d want to tweet whatever it is that you’re usually scheduling, and Buffer, with the help of FollowerWonk, will list the optimized times.
FollowerWonk founder Peter Bray offered a few extra creative ideas for using the tool in more ways than the one that we’ve described above.
For instance, instead of figuring out when people that are following you are on Twitter, selecting the option to analyze the people you’re following might be a more powerful strategy. You might want to target people you’re following and are following you back. Think of it this way: If the people you’re following are users you care enough about to follow, and if they’re following you back, there’s a higher chance they’ll engage with your tweets.
A second strategy is simply to do as the most influential users do. If there is someone that you believe has a great social media presence you’d like to replicate for yourself, you can borrow that Twitter user’s best times to tweet by typing in their Twitter username in FollowerWonk’s form field and then selecting “analyze their followers.” Then just take a page out of their book when it comes to tweet timing and targeting.
The Buffer-FollowerWonk combo is a nifty tool that’ll help target and optimize your tweets far better than the strategy you may be using now … which for many of us is random at best.
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