This is one of my posts originally published on iStrategy Conference, for more original post, head to their blog.
Brands and businesses use Twitter to gain visibility, brand awareness, increase sales, and ultimately drive traffic to their blog or website.
To do this, brands must first think of how to make their tweets visible to their audience.
One important factor to consider when it comes to tweeting is timing. To increase the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your articles or links, you need to be tweeting at the optimal time and not when people are asleep or having a busy day at work.
After doing some research to find out what is the best time to tweet, I want to share the results with you for FREE.
Are you ready?
RESEARCH #1
Dan Zarrella, social media scientist at Hubspot.
Key findings from his science of social timing on Twitter were:
- Best time to tweet for higher CTR: Noon & 6pm.
- Best day to tweet: midweek and weekends
RESEARCH #2
Meanwhile according to URL-shortening service bit.ly’s research, their study showed a slight difference with the first. According to their research:
- Best time to tweet: Afternoon (1-3pm EST)
- Best day to tweet: Monday – Thursday
source: Raka Creative
Here is an interesting part, according to the first research, the best day to tweet is on midweek and weekends. But according to the second research, Twitter doesn’t work on weekends.
THE TAKEAWAY
Although these are two great researches, what you should do is to conduct your own research to see what works best for YOU and your followers. You’ll need your own study to ensure that you’re tweets do not go to waste.
How do you do that? Here are a couple of FREE tools available online.
1. TweetWhen
TweetWhen by HubSpot is a tool that shows you the days and times for the most retweets (not CTR) per tweet.
According to my Twitter account:
The optimal time for me is at 1am (EST) (which is waaay off according to both studies) and 6pm (EST).
One reason for that is because I am from Asia and so do some of my followers, hence giving a slight difference in the result.
2. Tweriod
Tweriod gives you the best times to tweet according to you and your followers’ tweets. According to tweroid, my tweets gets most exposure when I tweet at 9pm and 12am as that is when my most followers are online. Comparing it with tweetwhen, the result was quite close.
Whats great with tweroid is you can use it with bufferapp. That way you can fully optimize your tweet timing. All you have to do is find out the best time to tweet with tweroid and then connect it to your buffer account and you’re set.
3. Timely
Timely.is is another tool you should try out, the tool measures your last 199 tweets and recommends four different hours that might help to optimize your tweets. If you use the tool, it will automatically schedules your tweet based on those hours. According toTimely.is my recommended hours for me to tweet was far off compared to tweetwhen and tweroid.
Other tools you can try is Social Bro, and I’ll let Ross outline his thoughts about using it in how to make you more awesome on twitter. (Recommended read)
SUMMARY
You may notice that all the tools aren’t showing similar results. That is because every tool has different algorithms and methods to measure what they think is optimal tweeting.
Experiment yourself base on the tools that I’ve listed above. You can use both research as a guide and use a URL-shortener to find what is the optimal time for you to tweet. I found out tweriod works best for me.
After you have found your optimal time, use scheduling tools such as bufferapp to tweet according to those times. You should also still pop in to engage with your audience, but main contents should be published according to your optimal time.
CONCLUSION
As you look further down the line, the optimal times are also a great selling point for those of you who are looking to slip in a bit of advertising strategy either for your own brand or for those who are looking to advertise through you.
You should also remember that other important factors to achieve success on Twitter is the level of engagement and relationships that you have with your audience, therefore although the optimal times can definitely help improve the visibility of your tweets, it may not connect well with your audience if you have little or no engagement with them.
photo credit: by Kathy Cassidy
It’s kind of frustrating to see all these studies contradicting each other. Oh well, like you said, it’s best to do our own research to see what works for our individual situations.
I know, and the funny thing is after I posted this, I found another research which was contradicting too. The best is to use a few tools and see what works. I found a couple of hours that works quite well for me that I’m using it to promote my blog post.
It would be great if you share how did you test and found out the best time to tweet.
Hi Aaron, I wasn’t really care about the time to tweet but when I’m finish reading your article, I changed and times to tweet is really important.
It makes you wonder what will work. I have seen Twitter Feeds that consist solely of links…thank you for the great information.
FYI Timely is no longer in service.
I use tweriod, I love the bufferapp integration
This is a great post. If only there were some stats for international areas too. Better do some more digging! Thanks for sharing.
What I don’t understant about tweriod it’s what time zone it’s best, it’s not saying hat, EST or…??? I’d be grateful if you’d clarify that, thank you!
This is a great article- I’ve been using BufferApp for a while now and I love it, so I’m excited to try out Tweriod with the integration. Unfortunately, I just checked out Timely.is and they have decided to shut it down 🙁
it is important that what you share, people must read or present their views on it.. so this post is really helpful to give an idea about when to post and when not.
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Mylife Refunds
Well, for me 8 pm is the best time to tweet:) This depends a lot from your auditory.
Great article Aaron! We have to experiment to find out the optimal time to tweet. I have tried scheduling overnight and it did not work to well haha. Thank you for the tools going to use them now.
Tweriod displays the results in your time zone. Time is determined by your Twitter profile.
Have you seen their new auto sync. Timing data pushes automatically now. It’s awesome!!
Hey Aaron, what I love about this post is that you mention each tool has its own algorithim and each account will be different. There are too many generic posts (certainly in the UK) that say ‘the best time to tweet is 15:00’ ignoring nuances like audience (e.g. moms who are on the school run.) Timely was a great product, its a shame they had to close, but doing these lookups isn’t cheap!
Our contribution to the debate is http://birdsongdtt.com/2013/07/when-is-the-best-time-to-tweet/ – we sample a large proportion of the followers audience base and define the times when the audience is most active, spotting potential gaps between account activity and their followers.
http://www.tweetthen.com/ is a new service that’s 100% free and works with the new twitter v1.1 API
To know the time for much engagement, simply use tweriod. If somebody have time for research that’s awesome.
The studies don’t necessarily contradict each other. The different studies probably test within different demographic groups. The group I target, working-age engineers, undoubtedly has peak times that are very different from the peak times of social media marketers, high schoolers, soccer moms, drug-dealers, or Twitter followers in general. You just have to go to a tool such as Tweriod and get your unique report.
By the way, Tweriod can take several days to analyze your feed. When you get the email, toss it and go to the site. The reports on your dashboard are much more useful.