Here’s an exercise for you: Open up TweetDeck or another Twitter client that uses the streaming API. Wait f0r the top of the hour. Then watch closely as your timeline explodes with tweets.

It’s a problem that hasn’t been written about much: Folks who schedule their tweets choose to (or have to, depending on software) schedule those tweets at certain points of the hour. For instance, HootSuite only allows someone to schedule tweets during 5-minute intervals starting at the bottom of each hour. Read more

Measuring referral traffic is essential for news organizations, or any website owner for that matter. However, there’s always been a major limitation to doing that. Measuring referrals from one of the most popular social networks, Twitter, has proven itself to be a formidable task.

But a long-awaited reprieve is coming. This week, Twitter began rolling out its Web analytics tool. All website owners will have access to the service in a matter of weeks, reports Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman.

The introduction of this tool will provide an official, baseline metric for everyone from news organizations to social media marketers to measure the impact that Twitter has on their websites. Currently, a wide array of often-pricy third-party products like Radian6, bit.ly enterprise and Sprout Social are required to obtain what feels like piecemeal Twitter analytics. Read more

It’s worth spending that extra time to post to your Facebook page, a new study says.

Facebook posts that are posted via a third-party app like HootSuite, TweetDeck, dlvr.it and others receive an average of 70 percent fewer likes and comments for each fan, according to a new study by Applum. Read more