A study by the Imperial College in London has found that there is a disconnect in the timing between Twitter use and companies marketing themselves to Twitter users, according to technology blog Techvibes.
The research found that while users’ activity usually peaks in the afternoons and evenings, the brands attempting to reach out to them typically tweet during business hours – and mostly in the mornings.
The study also found that it is possible to determine whether an account is being used by an individual human tweeter, a group of people or an automated Twitter account, without even looking at the subject being tweeted about.
The researchers found that they could determine who or what was doing the tweeting with 83% accuracy, based solely on the timing of tweets.
The timing of tweets sent by humans is highly predictable, the study said. The timing for automated accounts, however, is much more random.
“We have measured and shown that Twitter-using individuals have a distinct and characteristic structure in their tweeting behaviour, characterized by the tails of their inter-tweet time distribution and their rather more unstructured hourly tweet probability,” said the study.
