The secret to great marketing knowledge is great marketing research. Pretty much like every other marketing methodology available, Twitter is also sensitive to timing. As in social situations, timing is everything when it comes to twitter and when to publish links.
One of the uses for Twitter is publishing links to your website or blog. Most people use automated tools to post their contents as soon as they become available, but, the disadvantage to this is that most people hardly ever look at the timing of their tweets.
There are particular hours of the day when the most amount of people will click on your tweet, regardless of the size of your following. One of the biggest disadvantages of twitter is that people don’t always get all the messages in the stream or your message gets lost into a massive invasion of people microblogging simultaneously. Just picture this, I post a tweet right now and at the same time, at least another 1,000 people do the same. Let’s say that those thousand are all being followed by a person, what will happen is that the posts to be seen will be the ones available exactly at the moment the person opens the twitter page. This is frozen until the person refreshes the page and then gets to see the most recent influx of tweets. Your tweet will only be seen if by any coincidence the person happens to refresh at the same moment your post is being, well, posted. Suffice to say, this doesn’t happen that often.
Another way to get attention is from the twitter main page, the search function which people frequently use to find the latest tweets about their favorite subjects or whatever has got into their mind at that time. Again, your tweet is competing with thousands tweeting at the same time as you and will only be seen for a few seconds on every search related to that tweets subject (by subject we mean the words in your post).
There are also moments in the day when certain words will be more successful than others, when you will get the biggest amount of exposure per tweet possible. Of course, this time varies depending on many factors, the key is to always experiment with this and see what time gives you the most amount of clicks and response to your tweet.
To track all this you can use URL shortening services like Bit.ly or Owl.ly where you can shorten your URL and get real time stats on the number of clicks.
With this, now go and begin hunting for the best time for your tweets. Happy hunting and let me know how it goes!