Tweet at the right time for maximum impact with Timely

Choosing the best time to publish your tweets so that they’ll have the best response can be a difficult. Will people be more likely to read, retweet and reply to you at 2pm or 4pm? Midnight or Noon? It may seem like it’s pot luck, but Timely is a web app that aims to give you a helping hand.

Here’s how it works: you sign up and input the tweets that you want to publish. Timely will then use data from your previous 199 tweets to choose the best time to publish in order to (theoretically) get the best response. If you want your tweet out fast, you can ask it to post at the best time within the next 30 minutes, or otherwise you can let Timely choose the optimal point in the future for it to go out.

Timely supports unlimited Twitter accounts and offers a browser bookmarklet, allowing you to queue tweets without having to visit the site. You can select the number of tweets Timely sends out each day so that you’re not too noisy, and weekend tweets can be switched on or off depending on your preference.

The basic service is free but a paid-for pro account option is also available. This additionally allows you to export analytics on your tweets’ performance, post to Facebook and LinkedIn and submit tweets by email among other goodies. At $19.99 per month or $199 per year, it’s not cheap – especially as it’s hard to know whether Timely really is picking the best time for each tweet or not – but if you find Timely’s results impressive, it could prove a useful tool if you rely on Twitter for your business.

While I prefer to stick to the pot luck serendipity of tweeting when the mood strikes me, if you’re determined to get the most out of your tweets, Timely is certainly worth a try to see if it works for you.