There are many many Twitter apps and tools available out there, some far better than others (some verging on the utter pointless). So, it’s rare that I recommend one as generally they have quite a lot of holes in them or don’t really provide any data that is really very useful without further data mining to understand it.

However, in a return to Friday favorites, I’m spotlighting Tweriod. I like the simplicity of it. It analyzes up to 5,000 (for free, or up to 15,000 for a few dollars) of your followers to tell you typically when they tweet and therefore provide you with an idea of the timeframes as to when it is best to reach your followers.

There are some useless results, for example telling me that most of my followers are online between 9am and 10pm (no s**t Sherlock), but when you then look at the graphs in a little more detail, they do give greater insights that just might be useful. For me, it’s clear that the busiest period for my followers is from noon (probably because that’s when many of my US-based followers typically start coming online, which heightens the effect).

It’s all too easy when you’re someone who only follows a handful of people to forget that other people may follow a lot more than you and therefore will miss your tweets all too easily if they aren’t timed well (i.e. when they’re actually on Twitter), so this kind of insight is probably, in my opinion, one of the more useful out there. It does, however, also mean that just about everyone else also targeting your followers could also time their tweets to coincide with these peak times, thus increasing competition for your tweet actually being seen, but that’s a risk that seems worth taking at this moment in time.