The Best Time to Post on Twitter to Fly High

Did you know that with a day’s number of Tweets, one can write a 10 million page book?

That’s because Twitter is used by 326 million people every month and they send around 500 million tweets every day. At the same time, Twitter remains the top social network for government officials and most of the world’s leaders use this social network. Personally, I like following Elon Musk’s activity, how about you? It’s sad, but you can’t reach maximum exposure on Twitter, unless you find the best time to post for you personally, with regards to your audience’s habits and social media algorithms. But no worries. In this guide, you’ll find:

• Why Social Presence on Twitter Matters: General Facts
• Bare Necessities of Twitter Engagement
• The Best Time to Tweet to Get Likes, Clicks, and Retweets
• How to Find the Best Time to Tweet Using Twitter Analytics
• Twitter Posting Frequency
• How to Automate Twitter Posting

Why Social Presence on Twitter Matters: General Facts

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief recalls people rolling their eyes at the mention of Twitter in his lecture. Many still think that it has nothing to do with the media business. But raising Twitter’s archives of statistics, you’ll see that skeptics are mainly wrong. Twitter is a favorite and a front runner among millenials, as 81% access it at least once a day.

In some respects, Twitter is even better than Google as a search engine. Alan Rusbridger admits:

Google is limited to using algorithms to ferret out information in the unlikeliest hidden corners of the web. Twitter goes one stage further – harnessing the mass capabilities of human intelligence to the power of millions in order to find information that is new, valuable, relevant or entertaining.

In fact, 74% of Twitter users say they use the network to get their news. Seeing such a big opportunity at their fingertips, 65.8% of U.S. companies bigger than 100 employees in size use Twitter for marketing purposes. The results won’t make you wait: marketers admit that it’s a powerful tool because it rewards quality content with distribution. Agencies and freelancers, taking care of their clients’ brands and building presence on Twitter, should remember the following fact:

Attention:Twitter is the best in a class of its own because it allows you to organically reach 100% of your audience. Whenever you tweet, your post is going to pop up in every follower’s Twitter feed (in contrast to Facebook or LinkedIn with your posts’ organic reach around 2% and dropping).

Bare Necessities of Twitter Engagement

Before we jump to the best times to post on Twitter, let’s take a look at the basics for Twitter engagement and what you can do to boost it. When we say ‘engagement’ in the context of Twitter, we refer to the following actions:

• Impressions: The number of people who’ve seen your post.
• Clicks: How many times people clicked on it.
• Retweets: The number of shares.

As a user, you may engage with a tweet by replying, retweeting, favoriting, clicking, or sending a tweet in your direct message. No doubt, the more of the above your tweet receives, the more it will appear in others’ feeds and get noticed by a broader audience.

To deliver a great Twitter experience, social media managers, entrepreneurs, agencies, and freelancers have to bear in mind a few best practices and general rules that make tweets stand out.

Tweets accompanied by an image get 150% more retweets,  18% more click-throughs, and 89% more likes.

Visuals rock regardless of the social channel they appear on. It’s a widely known fact. The audience on Twitter appreciates up-to-date news, but what it loves more is unique images. Be sure to include a graphic with every tweet and you’ll see the positive imprint on your engagement.

Even though the length of tweets has increased from 140 to 280 characters, Twitter is still a place for brevity and precision.

It’s interesting to note, but brevity is in Twitter’s DNA. The decision to double the character count hasn’t dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. “Twitter is still regarded as a network for briefer thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters,” reports Sarah Perez, contributing to one Tech Crunch article.

Brands that focus on building conversations on Twitter can skyrocket their engagement. 

The best way to get engagement in your Twitter posts is to make use of Twitter polls. They are techniques to help you interact with your audience, let your creativity flow, and understand what drives people’s actions and opinions. Integrating Twitter polls into your tweets, you’ll discover more about your audience. Moreover, once the poll is over, all participants receive a push notification, which brings them back to your content.

Below, you’ll find an example of one popular Twitter poll:

It Mondays were shoes, they would be Crocs.
What helps you get through Monday? #mondaymotivation

— frank body (@frank_bod) October 3, 2016

To get higher engagement, try starting your tweets with words like “Thanks,” “Top,” “We,” “Congratulations,” “Learn,” and “Great” at the beginning of your tweets.

A little bit of semantics here. Researchers admit that these particular words have been associated with higher engagement than tweets which didn’t use them.

All of the above won’t bring you to the next level of efficiency unless you learn when is the best time to tweet and stick to Twitter peak hours.

The Best Time to Tweet to Get Likes, Clicks, and Retweets

Analyzing over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, a great study carried out by Buffer has highlighted many insights in terms of the best time of day to tweet. Here’s what their findings have shown, at the surface:

• The early morning hours tweets receive more clicks than tweets posted during the day.
• In turn, evenings and late-night posts on Twitter have a tendency to receive the most favorites and retweets.
• Times to tweet differ across time zones, but noon to 1:00 PM local time, on average, is the safest time to tweet for any time zone.
• The time people tweet most often is between 11:00 AM. and 1:00 PM, while the fewest tweets are sent between 3:00 and 4:00 AM.

Thus, the type of engagement is different for mornings and evenings. While the majority of clicks can happen in the morning, likes and retweets are in frequent rotation in the evening. It depends on what type of engagement you need more. Your posting times will depend on your goals. If you’re interested in clicks, it’s best to post in the morning. If you want to get more likes and retweets, be sure to post during the evenings.

Additionally, check out what were the most popular times to tweet in the United States in different time zones, as to Buffer’s investigation.

Source: Buffer

You can try posting during the most popular times or rather find success posting at non-peak times when the volume of tweets is lower.

It’s official: The two studies, conducted by Hootsuite and Buffer have shown that the best times to tweet are during your morning commute, the time before lunch, the evening commute, and between 9 p.m. and midnight.

Also, let’s see how Twitter posting would differ depending on the weekdays. Sprout Social’s study reveals that

• On Mondays, Twitter peak hours are from 9:00 to 10:00 AM.
• On Tuesdays, the most active hours are from 9:00 to 11:00 AM.
• On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the situation is similar to Tuesday, but the highest engagement occurs at 9:00 AM.
• On Fridays, you can receive higher engagement if you post from 8:00 to 11:00 AM.

Source: Sprout Social

As you can see from the image above, weekends promise less engagement than weekdays, so it’s not the best idea to post on Saturdays and Sundays. Otherwise, if there’s a necessity, you can post at 9:00 AM. In fact, the Argyle Social study has shown that weekdays provide 14% more engagement than weekends.

Peak Twitter times may be different based on your audience and the niche it represents. Data from SproutSocial research point to different days to post to Twitter when your audience’s interests are concerned. Have a look:

• Consumer goods: Sunday at 11:00 AM.
• Media companies: Thursday at 9:00 AM and 8:00 PM.
• Schools: Saturday at 5:00 PM.
• Nonprofits: Wednesday at 7:00 AM.
• Tech companies: Tuesday at 9:00 AM.
• Healthcare industry: Wednesday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM.

A great deal of information to remember, right?

How to Find the Best Time to Tweet Using Twitter Analytics

You can rely either on external data above, or on your own. It’s up to you to decide. In the long run, knowing when your audience is Twitter most active pays off in bigger engagement. To find out the best days to tweet, visit https://analytics.twitter.com/ and go to Tweets at the top right corner closer to the middle.

Hovering over the highest row, you’ll see the day when your post got the most impressions. In my case, it was a Thursday and then the pattern repeated. Now you know when your audience is the most active and can make better decisions as to when tweet. I’d recommend that you experiment for a month, tweeting every day, and then check Twitter analytics. In this way, your data will be more down-to-earth and reliable and you’ll be able to catch a trend. Also, in Audiences, you can check the niche your posts get most impressions from. Twitter analytics is a good way to find the time of day to tweet.

Twitter Posting Frequency

Because the life of a tweet is approximately 18 minutes, you’re encouraged to tweet a few times during the day. According to Hootsuite, the sweet spot for getting high tweet engagement is posting 8-10 tweets per day. This article from CoSchedule shows how often to post on social media, based on 14 studies, and concludes that it’s best to tweet 15 times a day. With such frequency daily, you won’t need to think about the high times Twitter loves the most. You’ll simply post once per hour, excluding midnight.

Also bear in mind that it’s considered normal to repost the same tweet for 7 times in a couple of months, for example. The engagement will start to fall down after you repost for the eighth time.

I Can’t Remember Them All: How to Automate Twitter Posting

Unfortunately, Twitter in action is a far cry from Twitter in theory. And we know that you try to build a social presence on other social channels as well. Combined with posting times for other networks apart from Twitter, you’ll have a difficult time remembering all these posting times and easily get confused.

PromoRepublic can give you a helping hand for maximum exposure. Our smart analytical social media posting tool suggests the best times and days to post on Twitter, relying on the data above, for different types of posts! All you need to do is to fill the information in our calendar and the system will do the rest – schedule your twitter posts at the appropriate time. In fact, you’ll be able to recycle your posts later and it’ll take less time to re-post them again.