Did you know that a total of 500 million tweets are shared each day? This amounts to almost 9281 tweets shared per second.
Overwhelmed? Is marketing on Twitter even a good idea?
With more than 300 million active users, Twitter holds the crown of being the most popular social media platform today. If you still do not have your business on Twitter, you are missing out on a large audience base that could convert to potential customers. Additionally, only 65% of businesses currently use Twitter for advertising, which implies that you could get a competitive advantage if you start Tweeting today!
But how do you navigate through the immense online traffic to effectively build your brand on Twitter?
On a fast-paced platform like Twitter, the timing of your post is perhaps the most important factor you need to consider. Good content is not the only thing that matters today; because if your timing is off, then your efforts might be in vain. Thus, identifying the best time to Tweet enables you to design a smart marketing strategy to share quality content throughout the day.
So, what is the best time to post on Twitter though?
The answer to that is a little more complicated than you think. As you will see in this blog, there is a general best time you can share your tweets, however, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper to find the best time for your business. Here’s a hint; Data analytics of your past Tweets is a very important source of information.
How Does Posting at the Right Time Matter?
If you pay attention to the Twitter algorithm, you will see how Tweeting at the ‘right’ time can make all the difference. Twitter users are given the choice to toggle between ‘top Tweets’ and ‘latest Tweets’ based on what they prefer. This enables users to access a chronological feed where they engage with new Tweets every second, that is, they see Tweets immediately as they are being posted. It is therefore essential to post at the right time on Twitter.
Isn’t that a good thing?
This could actually be a disadvantage to your business because your campaigns and tweets may get lost in the traffic as newer and ‘latest’ tweets replace old tweets at the top of the feed. That is why it is important to Tweet about your business when a majority of your target audience is online.
Find Your Best Time to Post on Twitter
Now that you know how Twitter works, you can strengthen your online presence and identify ways to improve your Digital Marketing Strategy.
Two Strategies you can use to Find the Best Time to Post on Twitter
1. Making Use of Twitter Analytics (Ft. SocialPilot’s)
Sadly, Twitter does not directly tell you the ‘best’ time to post but gives you useful information and insights if you conduct your own mini-experiments. Do not worry, these experiments will only last a month!
Create a schedule to post your tweets each day at different time slots. Make sure you cover different times of the morning, noon, evening, and midnight. If this sounds very taxing and effortful, you can always use SocialPilot. This is a Twitter management tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance for a specific day and time. Once a post has been scheduled, SocialPilot automatically Tweets the post without needing any reminders and without any delay!
Doesn’t that make your experiment easier? You will only need to select time slots for each post that goes up throughout the month.
At the end of one month, your experiment would have gathered some data about which days and time slots generate the most engagement for your tweets. You could also organize your data on a spreadsheet and use colors to rank which day brought you the highest engagement and what was the ‘best’ time to share the posts. You will need someone with good observational and analytical skills to make sense of this data.
Once your experiment is over and you have found your answers, you can continue using SocialPilot to automatically share tweets for you at your chosen date and time. This is one way of the efficient way to understand how the best time to post on Twitter works.
2. Sifting Through Your Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics will give you a detailed overview of the number of profile visits, Twitter impressions, and other engagement factors seen by your account. It enables you to track your progress regularly so that you can constantly review and revise your digital marketing strategies every few months. It’s the next best tool to analyze the best time to post on Twitter.
Are you wondering where you can find this absolutely free and very useful tool? It is available via your Twitter account at no additional cost at all!
Your Twitter account has a section called ‘Analytics’ which will give you an overview of the engagement seen by you in the last month. The ‘Tweets’ section will give you all the information you need about your Tweet activity. Unlike the analytics section, the Tweets section will allow you to see activity data as far back as years for your posts.
The best part? All of this data is presented to you in the form of graphs as well. This gives you a quick glance over the number of tweets you have shared and the number of organic and paid impressions you acquired on any given day. Additionally, you can see which were your top tweets, what impressions did they make, and their engagement rates. With all this information, you can also deduce what kind of content your target audience is liking and engaging with the most.
The above-mentioned strategies will give you sufficient insight to evaluate the best time to post on Twitter for your business without any difficulty.
Is There a General Best Time to Post on Twitter?
It is important that there is no universal best time to share your posts on Twitter. Different businesses target different customers with unique preferences and online behavioral patterns. However, knowing the general timings when users are active will enable you to conduct your experiments smoothly. For example, individuals are more active on weekdays and tend to engage more compared on weekends (because they spend time with family and other personal activities).
But let’s dig into this a little deeper to know the best time to post on Twitter conducted based on a study.
- Wednesday and Friday at 9 am are the Best Times to post on Twitter
- Wednesday and Friday are also the Best Days to post on Twitter
- Saturday is one of the Worst Days to post on Twitter as it garners the lowest engagement
Many different studies also highlight the Best Time to post on Twitter for Maximum Exposure and receiving Retweets:
- Some studies have found that Tweets shared between 2:00 am to 3:00 am earn the largest number of clicks
- In the US, 9:00 pm is when tweets earn the highest number of retweets and favorites. This trend starts building from 8:00 pm, reaches its peak at 9:00 pm, and starts fizzling out by 11:00 pm
- In contrast, the lowest engagement (retweets and favorites) was seen at 3:00 am
Additional Things to Keep in Mind
Based on some fascinating observations and the data collected by various brands, here are some timings that you can usually rely on to share your tweets as they are considered the best time to post on Twitter
- Twitter sees an increase in interactions in the early morning hour or late evening when users either wake up or are preparing for bed, this is one of the key insights for the best time to post on Twitter.
- Users also scroll through social media on their commute to work in the morning or when they have finished their work and are on their way home
- The distraction and escape that scrolling through social media provides has made it a popular pastime for employees during their lunch breaks at work
- Avoid weekends because people are either out, finishing house chores, or spending time with their family and will be very infrequent or mindlessly scroll through their feed, this is not the best time to post on Twitter.
Benefits of Marketing your Business on Twitter
We had mentioned earlier that Twitter is the most popular social media platform today, with a total of almost 300 million active users interacting on the platform daily. However, that is not the only advantage Twitter has to offer you. Let’s dive into some of its benefits :
1. Building Long-term Relations with Direct Messages
The option of direct messaging on Twitter has been reserved for accounts that mutually follow each other (unless one of the accounts has an ‘open’ inbox). While some marketers see it as a drawback, it ensures that your target customers are given personal attention and customized care through engaging, authentic, and worthwhile communication.
2. Tweeting Multiple Times a Day is not Annoying
No other social media platform can boast this claim, in fact, businesses are encouraged to share a minimum of 15 tweets per day. Tweets have a very short lifespan and get replaced every second owing to Twitter’s chronological interface.
3. Monitoring Twitter with TweetDeck
If you use TweetDeck, you can keep an eye on the posts shared by a competitor’s account, tweets that use a particular keyword or you can follow a particular hashtag. This tool curates the content you see by providing individual feeds for each parameter you follow. This keeps you informed about the latest discussions and trends in your industry. It also allows you to monitor the complaints and reviews that are being tweeted for your competitor’s brand, which will help you keep in touch with the needs of the market.
4. Increasing Traffic for Your Website
Social media platforms help convey the voice and feel of your brand. If your tweets have made some users curious about your products and services, they will stop by your page to see what kind of content you put out in and about your offerings. Almost 47% of these users will also visit your website. It is thus crucial that your social media account and the homepage of your website are consistent in terms of your brand voice, aesthetic, and vibe.
5. Creating a Buyer Persona using Follower insights
Twitter provides users with various analytics for free. One of these analytics includes an ‘Audience’ section which helps marketers create a persona of their average follower. You have access to information about the demographics, consumer behavior, lifestyle, and mobile footprint of all your followers. This information will help you design an effective digital marketing plan and online campaign to attract potential customers.
6. Low Costs of Advertisement
While the biggest strength of Twitter is optimization, you can also spend a small amount of one dollar per day to advertise your brand. Twitter Ads help marketers create an effective campaign by suggesting specific parameters to maximize its impact on the target audience. Studies have found that Twitter marketing campaigns could deliver up to 40% higher return on investment as compared to other options.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, knowing the ‘best’ time to post on Twitter is crucial because of Twitter’s algorithm and chronological feed. Identifying the peak time of engagement and interaction for your business will help you build a connection with your target audience and motivate them to visit your website or try out your products and services.
Once you have found the ‘best’ time to post on Twitter advertisements and run campaigns for your business, you can create a schedule for your Twitter Marketing Strategy. You can also use Twitter marketing tools to automatically share posts on your designated days and timings; to minimize your workload and maximize your efficiency. Over time, you may observe a rise in the number of engagements and profile visits seen by your account.
If you’re curious to know about the best time to post on LinkedIn, its algorithm, and how it works, check out this blog.
However, remember that your first digital marketing plan may not be the best or final one. You need to regularly look at your data and analytics to revise your digital marketing plan at different stages. If you’re curious to know what is LinkedIn’s algorithm for the best time to post, check this blog.
Standing out from the crowd is important in today’s competitive world. If you have a strong understanding of digital marketing, skills, and knowledge, you will be able to succeed in this competitive skills and knowledge you gain, you will be able to succeed in this competitive industry.
Start building a name for your brand on Twitter today!
