Twitter is obviously an amazing platform that promotes nearly an endless number of conversations and interactions.  The downside to this is the limited amount of time that people can dedicate to twitter.  In order to maximize the limited time you have for twitter, we recommend a visit to Tweriod.

Tweriod is a service that analyses both your tweets and your followers’ tweets.  Signing up for this service is simple.  You simply need to visit their site, sign in with twitter and wait.  Tweriod can take anywhere from a couple hours to a little over a day to analyze your account.  After that, it’s as simple as logging back onto their site and you are able to see the optimal times to tweet from your account.

After signing up for their analysis, it took a day to get my results—which is understandable for larger accounts.  My peak times were all after 5PM.  This information is extremely useful, because I now know that my time on twitter is best spent later in the day.  While tweeting in the morning can never hurt, I will see my highest returns at night.

It is understandable that your schedule may not sync with what Tweriod comes back with.  If this happens, there are a few routes you can pursue.  First, you could start scheduling tweets for the time that Tweriod generates.  Secondly, you could try readjusting your regular schedule.  There are pluses and minuses to both of these options.  The best would be a hybrid of the two.  If you tweet news stories or other commentary, these could be written and scheduled earlier in the day.  These tweets will provide the regular tweets that your followers are used to.  Then when you receive any replies or see a tweet that you find interesting, you could interact later in the day.

It is important to remember that Tweriod tells you what was, and not what will be.  This means that you should play around with the information you receive.  While I see peak activity at 5-6pm and 8-9pm, I would rather tweet 5-7 versus tweeting later at night.  You should experiment with the information that you find.  Tweriod can be a powerful tool, but you should experiment with its results for the best effect.

Want to maximize your twitter presence? Ever wonder how to be retweeted more often? Enjoy twitter but want to take your account to the next level? Well you’ve come to the right place!  Digital Acumen pleased to announce a new promotion we’ll be doing through January.  Starting this Wednesday and going through the end of the month, we will be hosting Ask Acumen Wednesdays.  This is your chance to talk with our twitter experts.

Tweet any questions you have at @DigitalAcumen from 3-5 ET on Wednesdays, with the hashtag #digitalacumen.  This way, even if you don’t have a question you can still participate in the conversation by following our hashtag

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Twitter thrives on interactions and the connections that users make.  Oftentimes, users will interact over a shared sentiment or just a funny tweet.  But how do users get to this point?  While any and every interest is represented on twitter, this can be almost too overwhelming.  With literally hundreds of millions of accounts on twitter, how do you know who to follow or tweet with?  Wouldn’t it be useful to just glance at a page and know if a user was “follow-worthy?”  Well there is a service that does just that.

Twitterland make a job that is normally rather time consuming instantaneous.  By simply uploading a user’s handle into the search column, twitterland’s minimalist site quickly breaks down the account.  Twitterland then generates a pie-chart breakdown of their tweets.  This pie-chart graphically shows how often the user replies, tweets and retweets other users.  If you wanted to talk to someone, but they only reply 2% of the time, you may want to follow someone else.

Having a tool such as twitterland allows new users to get a feel for twitter that normally would take time to develop.  More seasoned tweet-heads will also find twitterland quite useful however.  A secondary use for Twitterland is to measure your own success on twitter.  How often do you tweet, how often are your tweets retweeted?  Rather than to rely on anecdotal evidence, it takes a minute with Twitterland to find the answer.

I have used twitterland myself to monitor my own tweets.  While other softwares may spit out the number of times I retweet others, the graph that twitterland gives you is instantly understood.  There’s a rather large difference between a user who tweets forty times a day and does three retweets and the user who tweets six times a day and does five retweets.  If these numbers were viewed by themselves they seem almost meaningless.  Twitterland helps to contextualize the numbers.

A brief glance at twitterland also will expose users to numerous other features, such as a list of users that a person has tweeted at, their most popular retweets and other information.  All of this can help you get a fast but rather comprehensive take on who you are tweeting with.  Now the next time you find a user who interests you, rather than having to read through all their tweets, just head over to Twitterland.

Oftentimes the headlines I see rolling across my twitter feed are up to a day ahead of mainstream news sources.  How does this happen? Do twitter users have access to  a time-space vortex or powers of precognition?  Clearly this is not the case.  Put simply, a number of “plugged in” users who regularly scour the internet are able to find fresh news.  Twitter then allows them to disperse this information to their followers—ranging from tens to tens of thousands of tweet aficionados instantaneously.

 This system is extremely dynamic and engaging, but how do you know if you’re reading all the pertinent news?  Maybe you need to stay on top of the latest developments in a certain field.  Maybe another user follows sports or politics.  Whereas the general population used to be reliant upon traditional news sources for this information, twitter now allows us to engage thousands of reporters instantaneously and directly.

The ability to get nearly all of tomorrow’s news today is exactly what Muck Rack was created to do.  Their About page starts simply by asking “What if you could get tomorrow’s newspaper today?” While it is obvious that they cannot predict future news, their service does allow users to follow reporting in real time.

Their free site has a seemingly exhaustive list of reporters from all major news organizations and allows you to view their tweets as they happen.  Do you want to get all the latest updates on say—Sports in your own twitter feed? This is not a problem! Muck Rack allows users to mass-follow these industry leaders with only a few clicks.  Such a service has an almost endless number of applications.  It allows students to access multiple news sources in one self contained site.  Muck Rack also is a great tool for bloggers.  Rather than having to troll multiple RSS feeds or news sites, they are able to look at what is happening in any particular industry in real time, all on one site.

To be clear, there area  few things Muck Rack is not. It’s not psychic and it’s not a panacea.  What it does do however, is to unify multiple news channels and allows users to easily engage the reporters behind the story. With this new access, news becomes much more accessible and can be dispersed much more rapidly than ever before.

Twitter allows you to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere in the world – and also with those in outer space. It is used for virtually every business, marketing, political and personal use you can think of. If you’re not on Twitter – you’re already behind.

The below video is a great example of the diversity of uses, people and professionals who utilize Twitter on a daily basis.