What’s the Best Time to Tweet?
Whenever we, humans, are in possession of interesting information we have an insuppressible urge to share it with the world – or at least family, friends and acquaintances.
However, this compulsion is best suited to the practice of telephoning when you are more or less assured that your contact will answer the phone. When communicating across cyberspace, you should increase the chances that your information will be read by your targeted audience – or a sizable portion of it.
With more than 500 million daily tweets, boosting your chances of being read is key to your survival.
Your next step after deciding to market or promote yourself by tweeting or posting is to create a profile of your audience. Who comprises your audience? Are you sure you are digitally disseminating information that is genuinely of interest to your audience? This question must be answered by civil society promoting global issues as well as small businesses offering products and services. You shouldn’t miss your target by circulating throughout cyberspace information that is of no interest to your audience.
The most operational posts on social media have a clear goal and mission, whether driving traffic to your blog or website, encouraging comments, getting shared, discussing the SDGs, introducing new products or services, or something else that is mutually beneficial. The first commandment is to keep the information real and relevant. Social media advisers suggest that on Facebook and Twitter, your posts should be about 30% promotional content that links back to your website or blog, and 70% value-added content that includes relevant information your target audience would find useful or interesting like benefits.
Afterward, consider where does your audience reside? Did you know that 50% of the US population is in the Eastern Time Zone, and the Eastern and Central combined represent almost 80% of the country’s population? If that statistic is important then you should take it into consideration when tweeting and posting. Otherwise, your audience is liable to be asleep and miss your information.
Even though communicating in cyberspace is a relatively new practice and trends are still emerging, social media consultants are building a reputable treasury of beneficial statistics. One of them, Kevan Lee, observed:
“Based on all of the tweet data we have collected, the early morning hours appear to be the time in which tweets receive the most clicks, on average; Evenings and late at night are the times when your tweets receive the most favorites and retweets, on average; In some cases, times with the highest amount of average engagement are almost inversely related to the most popular times to tweet; The most popular time to tweet and the best times to tweet for engagement differ across time zones, so it’s still important to experiment and find the times when your audience is most engaged.”
As for specific hours, one popular time to tweet is between noon and 1 pm. Why? Researchers have found that people check their Twitter accounts during lunch.
Twitter did an interesting study of users and found that they are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute. They’re also 119% more likely to use Twitter during work or school hours.
Other optimal times to tweet are 12–3 pm, with a peak best time at 5 pm. The best time is during the work week, though some niches might have more active audiences on the weekend.
The Huffington Post discovered that for maximum retweets, post at 12 pm and 5 pm. The best days to post for B2B organizations is Monday–Friday, and for B2C it’s the weekends and Wednesdays. I have found that when tweeting about issues or political/social observations, your audience is likely to be more available than not.
According to a study by Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at HubSpot, tweets posted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday have higher click-through-rates (CRTs) compared with those posted during the other days of the week. He said a possible explanation could be that more users are on Twitter during non-work hours when they have more free time to spend on social media.
Experiment with tweeting at various times on the weekend to see if your updates get more engagement in the form of replies, favorites or retweets.
For fine tuning statistics about your audience’s availability, it’s recommended that you use tracking services such as Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics or any other similar provisions.
Additionally, other social media outlets, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., have their own specific prime posting times. The best time to post on social media depends on a variety of factors, including the region of the country or world you’re targeting, the type of information you post, the platform, your target audience and how they interact with the platform. This means businesses may find different times of the day work best for them. In other words, know your audience.
The shelf life of a tweet can be very short and experts say it could last up to eight hours depending on how your followers use Twitter. Consequently, you must develop the habit of using hashtags # – the symbol that resembles the number or pound sign. Use even three or four of them in one tweet. When you use appropriate hashtags that conform to the interests or your audience, your tweet will exist longer in cyberspace and can be tracked by interested parties.
Another way to overcome the time pressure of tweeting is to tweet several times a day to ensure maximizing exposure for your tweeted information. You can repeat this process effectively for a couple of days without becoming obnoxious.
Send your examples
Join the conversation in cyberspace about boosting your outreach. If you have examples of how you used social media to boost outreach, let me know about it and I’ll help you spread the word about your success.
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