When is the Best Time to Tweet? Here’s What the Data Shows
Twitter is an excellent way to great way to market your brand and reach out to your followers. After all, there are 330 million monthly active users, according to data from Hootsuite. About 261 million of those people live outside the US, meaning that any message you sent has the potential to travel across the world. Plus, over 40% of Twitter users check the app at least once a day, meaning that there are countless opportunities for people to see your message.
But it can be difficult determining the right time to send out your messages. Your audience members most likely live in different time zones, and it is almost impossible to know when most of them will be online. Luckily, it’s easy to gather research from multiple sources to give some mostly definitive answers.
First, it is essential to know the time zones from which your audience is tweeting. About 48% of Twitter users are in the Eastern Time Zone, 33% in the Central Time Zone, and 14% in the Pacific Time Zone. You can find out more specific details by looking at your own Twitter analytics.
Infographics from websites like Fuseworks, KISSmetrics, Dan Zarella, and Adweek all say that weekends are the best time to tweet. It makes sense as that’s when most people have free time. The majority of people work during the weekdays and will hopefully not check social media while on the job.
On the other hand, SurePayroll’s infographic says that Mondays through Thursdays are the best time to tweet. Argyle Social’s infographic says that engagement is 14% higher on weekdays for B2B tweets.
Most of the sources agree that tweets sent on Wednesday and Thursday all provide higher engagement and click-through rates. Fusework disagrees, however, and says that those days offer the lowest engagement rate.
The best times to tweet are when people are commuting to work (8 to 9 a.m.), taking their lunch break (noon to 1 pm), and going home (5 to 6 p.m.). The information differs slightly across the sources, but there seems to be a consensus that people check their Twitter feed during their break or commute. Additionally, mobile users are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute. Late nights and early mornings are unanimously agreed to be the worst times to tweet.
That brings up one more issue: how can you send out tweets at the right time? Surely, you don’t plan on setting the alarm for when to send out specific tweets. That would be incredibly tedious. Fortunately, you can use apps like Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule tweets for you. Each app has a free plan, and you can always upgrade to get better results and higher-quality service.
Make sure to use Twitter Analytics to see how well your reach is doing. You may find that it’s best to experiment with different times. See which times give you the highest levels of engagement.