Tweet late, email early, and don't forget about Saturday: Using data to develop a social media strategy

At this point in the social media game, there's a lot of pontification being pitched about and not whole lot of the Dragnet ethic. It's hard to say what's what about social media at this point, but this analysis gives a few great pointers. Try them out and see for yourself. A few I'm going to try to ride with:

• Tweet a lot to accumulate as many followers as possible, but if your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you should show a little more restraint; accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one.

• Reach people when the noise of the crowd has died down. It turns out that time is often the afternoons, when blogs and news sites are slower, and the weekend, when they're all but asleep.

• Retweet activity is highest late in the work day, between 2 and 5 p.m., and the sweet spot (tweet spot?) is 4 p.m. Late in the week is most retweetable, too.

Use TweetWhen to analyze your Twitter account to see what time days and times yield the most retweets.

Read the full story at Nieman Journalism Lab.