When you post on Twitter is just as important -- sometimes more so -- than what you say.
That's because the tweets flash past in real time. If you only have a few dozen people you follow, or following you, that's not a problem.
Except that Twitter isn't really meant for having a few dozen followers. It's not email. The whole idea is to communicate with a broad audience.
Say you have 500 followers, and you follow 500 people. Say you post once a day and each of your friends on Twitter post once a day.
What are the odds more than a handful of people will be looking at Twitter when you post? Not good.
The answer isn't to put up dozens of posts per day.
Part of the answer is to time it right.
Public relations means your primary audience is the press.
Imagine being a reporter or editor. Think about your day: you get to work, go to meetings to plan news coverage, then go out, research stories, interview people and put your work in the newspaper or on the air. Then you go home.
You can rule out most of the day as being a bad time to tweet journalists.
Don't tweet when they're at home or asleep. Don't tweet when they're trying to eat lunch, or write stories on deadline. So unless it's breaking news you need to share with them, the afternoon or evening doesn't look ideal for most reporters.
Clearly, the best time to tweet story ideas and pitches is in the morning. I wouldn't recommend the crack of dawn, or the first thing in the morning. Journalists get tons of emails. Their fingers have thick callouses from hitting the delete button.
If we really want to pin it down, from about 10 a.m. to noon looks smart. You're not bugging them the second they get in the door, or when they're trying to grab lunch, file stories or go home to see their kids and family.
There are exception to this, of course. Any kind of event, or breaking news, means you should tweet right when it happens.
Different types of PR -- political, sports, entertaining -- will also have different schedules and news cycles. Radio broadcasts news constantly. They have multiple deadlines throughout the day. Newspapers do have blogs, but they still publish the paper only once a day. TV is in between, with noon, five o'clock and late-night news. Sports reporters work late, covering games. Rock journalists and movie reviewers probably work different hours than newspaper reporters.
It's a good idea to experiment a bit to see what works and what doesn't, and to ask reporters who cover your area what hours they work, and when they're hunting for story ideas versus pounding on the keyboard to beat deadline.