People who have way too much time on their hands, have done a study to chart the mood swings of the average Twitter user over the course of a week.

Stick with me, it gets good-ish.

The people running this test come from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University. They used over 300 million tweets that were posted between Sep 2006 – Aug 2009 and they charted them based on geographic location and mood of the tweet. The moods were determined through the use of the ANEW scale from the University of Florida which rates a large number of English words in terms of the emotions they convey. (Still with me?)

What the study determined is that there are more happy tweets early in the morning, late in the evening and on weekends. Not surprising when you figure that everything in between those times are traditional working hours, which proves that most people are not happy at their jobs, or at least not happy enough to tweet about it.

Sunday mornings are a particularly happy tweet time for people and Thursday evening is rough. I think that’s because all of the best TV shows are scheduled on Thursday nights and it’s frustrating to have to choose.

It’s also interesting to note that West Coast moods generally follow East Coast moods with a delay of. . . you guessed it. . three hours.

While this data is intriguing and the chart they made is fun to look at, there really is some information here that you can use. If you’re running a Twitter campaign, schedule your tweets to hit before noon and after seven in the evening but be wary of time zones. Sending tweets from the NY office at six will land at the ultimate low tide for Twitter users in Los Angeles.

There is an exception to this rule. You may want to send your tweets in the middle of the day if you’re selling something that depends on a negative mood such as an ebook on quitting your job or 101 Ways to Get Revenge After Being Dumped.

What do you think? Can timed tweets effect the results of your Twitter marketing campaign? Or is one tweet time as good as any other?