During a recent HubSpot webinar, they launched a new tool called “TweetWhen“. Influenced by their theme of being scientific (rather than merely opinion based) about social media, this free tool tells you two, simple things:

• During which hour of the day most of your tweets are retweeted
• During which day of the week most of your tweets are retweeted

The data is presented in two graphs, with time on the Y axis and number of retweets on the Y. No specifics, just peaks and valleys. Obviously, retweets are not the end-all be-all of tweet reach, but they are a fairly accurate measure of engagement with your followers.

Interested in how this data averaged out for US ski resorts, I took the graphs of 32 resorts on Twitter and overlaid them one on top of the other. I also made each graph semi-transparent: the more lines and datapoints that overlap, the darker that area will be.

Note: All times are ET
The small orange hubspot logo marks the highest peak on any one graph.

HOURS OF THE DAY

There wasn’t enough data for each time zone to do valuable graphs for various states, but you can still see the trends. Morning hours, likely because of snow reports, powder alerts, daily updates, etc. see the most retweets by far. That is clearly a window you don’t want your Twitter managers to miss.

There are other bright areas in the early afternoon and early evening as well. Scheduling tweets to be sent out later in the evening when skiers get home from work might be worth a try.

DAYS OF THE WEEK

Once again, this graph makes it pretty clear that if your are going to miss a few days on Twitter, make it a weekend and not a Monday or Tuesday. Finding ways to keep tweets fresh and interesting the rest of the week may bring those numbers up a bit.

Seems we show up on Mondays with lots of ideas, ready to tackle the week. Then, as the week goes by, our creativity dips right along with our motivation. I wonder if writing non-time-sensitive tweets on Monday and Tuesday that will be sent later in the week might help the mood and tone of those posts.

Either way, interesting data to consider. It takes about 30 seconds to create the report for your resort if you have enough tweets for the system to create a chart from.

If you have the time the Webinar about timing (covering tweets, Facebook posts, and emails) was pretty impressive:
http://www.hubspot.com/webinars/science-of-timing-thanks

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.