How to Find the Best Times to Tweet
One of the “10 Ways to Get More Clicks on Your Company Tweets” from last week’s blog post was “Tweet when your followers are online.” We told you to learn when your audience is most engaged. It’s one thing to say and another thing to do. Unless you have the time to interview all of your followers, how are you supposed to figure out when your audience is online?
We’ll answer that question for you today. By the end of it, you’ll know how to find the best times to tweet. Your content will be read by a number of new eyes as you strategically tweet at the optimal times.
How to Find the Best Times to Tweet
Use the data.
The first method to find the best times to tweet is to use data to experiment on your own, using the results to draw conclusions. Here’s how.
-
Pick a number of different times to test (4 is a good number to start).
-
Schedule tweets for each of those times. Try to keep the tweet content similar for each one.
-
Check out the analytics. Which tweet had the most engagement?
-
Keep testing. Try steps 1-3 on different days of the week and compare results.
Repeat this process whenever you feel like your audience has changed.
Use the research.
Let others do the work for you. This research isn’t tailored for your specific audience, but, many times, the same generalities apply. Try it out and see how your followers respond.
-
Click-throughs are generally higher on the weekend and at midweek, on Wednesdays.
-
Retweets are the highest around 5 pm.
-
Clicks are the highest is 1-3 pm Monday through Thursday.
-
Clicks are also high at noon and 6 pm.
-
Twitter gets the most traffic from 9 am through 3 pm.
Use the pros.
What are the industry leaders in your niche doing? If you’re following them, you’ll start to get an idea of when and where and what they tweet.
You can also do your own research – what are the bigwigs on Twitter doing? You know, the companies with many, many engaged followers. Once you’ve figured that out, you can trying implementing their best practices into your own Twitter strategy. Again, run your own tests to find out which of them works best for your specific audience.
