Best Time to Tweet: When to tweet for higher engagement?
Twitter is a fast-paced social media site that requires you to consider more than just what you’re writing. Timing, in particular, is a critical factor. And, it can be a bit tricky to find the best time to tweet. In order to get the most out of your efforts on Twitter marketing, you need to know the best times to post on Twitter.
Posting at the right time helps capture attention when users are most active, increasing the chances of your tweets being seen and engaged with.
Identifying the right time to tweet allows you to work smartly by focusing your efforts on a few quality posts strategically scattered throughout the day, rather than just going for sheer volume. In this blog, we are going to talk about how you can find your best time to tweet and increase your Twitter engagement.
Whatever the other points may be, one thing is certain: Twitter’s updated algorithm has made the timing of tweets more critical than ever before. Time matter when it comes to maximizing tweet visibility and engagement. People can see tweets according to their preferences – top tweets or latest tweets. Thus, it is actually possible to switch to a chronological feed instead of an engagement-based one.
Keeping this in mind, all Twitter users, especially who use Twitter for business, have to find out their own unique best time to tweet. This guide is all about helping you determine the best time to tweet and get the maximum interactions within the first hours of posting.
What is the Best Time to Tweet Overall?
Well, to be very clear – There is no ‘one-time-fits-all’ best time to upload a tweet.
There are a lot of factors that will affect this timing including your audience, type of business, objective, and more. However, there are some general guidelines that you can follow to know your unique time. People tend to engage more throughout the weekdays and less on weekends as they’re busy with personal activities.
Source: Sprout Social
According to this study made by Sprout Social, which analyzed engagement data to identify peak engagement times, we can determine the following:
- Best times: Wednesday and Friday at 9 a.m.
- Best days: Wednesday and Friday
- Worst day: Saturday
These times represent the optimal time and peak times for most engagement, especially during mid morning and early morning hours. High engagement is often observed during these peak engagement times, particularly in the eastern time zone.
Now, let’s have a look at the best time to tweet for different industries.
Best time: Wednesday to Friday – 7 AM to 4 PM
Best day: Thursday and Friday
Worst day: Saturday
Twitter has become an important platform for the media, with several journalists, writers, and industry experts exchanging ideas and thoughts around the clock. Utilize advanced Twitter search and monitoring techniques to find out relevant conversations and broaden the base of followers.
Time Zones and Posting Times
When it comes to maximizing engagement on Twitter, understanding the role of time zones is essential. Since Twitter users are located all around the world, their peak activity hours can vary widely. Most social media managers know that posting at the right time in their audience’s primary time zone can make a significant difference in tweet performance and overall engagement rates.
For brands or individuals with a global or national following, it’s important to identify where the majority of your target audience is located. Social media managers often use Twitter analytics or a social media management tool to analyze when their followers are most active. By aligning your posting times with the peak hours of your audience’s time zone, you increase the chances of your tweets appearing at the top of their Twitter feed, leading to maximum engagement.
If your audience is concentrated in a specific region, such as the Eastern or Central time zone, adjust your posting schedule to match their most active periods. For those with a more diverse audience, consider scheduling tweets at different hours to reach users in various locations. This approach helps ensure your Twitter content is seen by more users, no matter where they are in the world.
Ultimately, fine-tuning your posting times based on time zone data is a key strategy for social media managers looking to boost engagement and grow their brand’s presence on Twitter. By paying attention to when your audience engages most, you can optimize your Twitter content strategy for the best possible results.
2. Best time to tweet for consumer goods
Best time: Saturday and Sunday – 8 AM to 5 PM
Best day: Sunday
Worst day: Monday and Thursday
Twitter is a crucial platform for providing social customer support, so it is important for consumer goods and retail companies to improve their strategy for managing and reacting to customer queries. If you are a business dealing with consumer goods, you need to be proactive as well as reactive on Twitter by doing product promotions, sharing relevant content such as product updates, customer testimonials, and industry news, shouting out positive customer reviews, and maintaining a continuous content calendar.
3. Best time to tweet for technical businesses
Best time: Tuesday to Friday – 7 AM to 1 PM
Best day: Tuesday and Wednesday
Worst day: Sunday
It’s no wonder that tech-savvy people are very involved on Twitter, making it a busy forum where all sorts of technology and software brands are seeking to stand out from competitors. When you are developing a social media marketing strategy for the SaaS space, it is important to post at the optimal timings to get your content seen by new and relevant audiences. Analyzing user activity and user behavior on Twitter can help you identify the optimal posting times and the best time slots for your technical audience, ensuring your posts reach users when engagement is highest. It can be safely said that posting during working hours will provide the maximum results.
4. Best time to tweet for financial businesses
Best time: Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday – 8 AM to 5 PM
Best day: Tuesday
Worst day: Saturday
Financial firms use X (formerly Twitter) to share breaking news, join trending topics, and participate in trending conversations about the markets, making it a key platform for real-time engagement. Twitter has become a popular center for discussing events in the financial world, facilitated by features such as stock symbols that work just like hashtags in aspects of search and exposure. In many situations, these discussions take place at a global level and continue to happen as markets open and close in various regions. If your brand wants to remain linked to global audiences around the clock, make sure that you have a global social media strategy in place. It will let you handle the dynamics of teams or multiple local accounts, all with a persistent voice.
5. Best time to tweet for the education sector
Best time: Wednesday and Saturday – 8 AM to 9 PM
Best day: Saturday
Worst day: Sunday
Twitter helps educational institutions to keep in touch with their families, promote to potential students, and connect alumni through timely updates. This sector observes similar engagement timings on all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, it’s important for educational institutions to consider optimal posting times on other social media platforms as well, since each platform has unique engagement patterns and best times to post. Additionally, using relevant hashtags on social media platforms can increase discoverability and engagement, helping your content reach a wider and more targeted audience. No doubt, the engagement level is scattered in bits throughout the week, as parents like to stay updated with the latest news.
6. Best time to tweet for healthcare sector
Best time: Monday to Friday – 8 AM to 3 PM
Best day: Wednesday
Worst day: Saturday and Sunday
Twitter is an excellent platform for healthcare providers and organizations to engage with their clients directly on their health and well-being issues and concerns. As the nature of these questions is really serious, you need to develop a set of guidelines that can be used by your social team to respond accurately to customers. Maintaining a strong social media presence helps healthcare organizations connect with potential customers and build credibility. A level of trust needs to be built with your audience by providing timely and authentic responses.7.
7. Best time to tweet for Non-profit sector
Best time: Wednesday to Friday – 7 AM to 2 PM
Best day: Wednesday
Worst day: Saturday
For non-profits, Twitter is the perfect place to unlock their fan base, not only to raise awareness regarding their cause and mission but also to encourage people to drive traffic and attract donors. Supplement the Twitter strategy with platform-specific techniques, such as the use of exclusive hashtags to coordinate and execute discussions around events or relevant campaigns. Posting timings can be experimented with, as the audience is normally active during entire weekdays. Non-profits can schedule posts in advance using social media scheduling tools like Buffer to save time and maintain a consistent presence throughout the week.
8. Best time to tweet for recreation
Best time: Monday to Friday – 8 AM to 1 PM
Best day: Friday
Worst day: Saturday and Sunday
For recreation destinations, a comprehensive review management plan and an emphasis on social customer service can have a significant effect on visibility and reputation that helps you distinguish from competitors. Very few recreation brands focus on Twitter as compared to other social networking sites like Instagram and Facebook. And that makes for the perfect chance to enter the untapped market and build an audience on Twitter. To drive follower growth and engagement, experiment with different content types, including video posts, as testing what resonates best with your audience can help expand your reach. It will extend your fanbase and followers, and will help you in increasing traffic to website and other social channels.
4 Strategies to Find the Best Time to tweet for Your Brand
1. Focus on your business type
The best time to tweet also depends on whether you have a B2B or a B2C business. For B2B businesses, the best time to post on Twitter is weekdays during standard business hours. More specifically, 9 am to 4 pm on Mondays and Thursdays are the best, particularly during lunchtime from 11 am to 1 pm. Most weekdays, especially during early afternoon hours (12 pm to 3 pm), tend to see higher engagement for both B2B and B2C businesses.
B2C businesses see a less tremendous change between days of the week than B2B companies do. Consumers can do their shopping and product research during off-hours or days, but businesses are mainly operating during standard business hours. Even for B2C companies, though, weekdays tend to be better for posting. The best time overall for B2C companies is during lunchtime, 12 to 1 pm.
2. Learn about your audience
When you’re timing your tweets, think about an average day for your audience, and when they’d most likely have downtime to browse through their Twitter feed. For example, if your audience is parents who stay normally at home, the best time to post on Twitter would be different as compared to when you’re targeting teenagers or adults.
Think about their habits and daily schedules and utilize that information to help your Twitter posting strategy. Analyze data to identify when your specific audience or specific target audience is most active on Twitter, as this will help you tailor your posting times for maximum engagement.
3. Keep a track of engagement and interactions
The best way to find out your own time to tweet is to have a look at your account’s data. Check when your most engaging tweets were posted to find the best times for future posts. You can track impressions, profile visits, numbers of tweets, and more from your Twitter analytics dashboard.
Twitter’s native analytics won’t directly tell you the best times to tweet. However, you can use post based analytics tools to determine optimal posting times by analyzing when your audience is most active. Based on this data, you can adjust based on observed engagement patterns or your local time zone to maximize reach. According to that information, you can keep a track manually. Find out the pattern and then follow it to post in the future.
4. Use a twitter automation tool
Using a tool like TweetFull will also help you in building engagement and reaching your audiences 24/7. Automation tools can help you fine-tune your posting schedule for your Twitter account to maximize engagement by analyzing when your audience is most active and adjusting your posts accordingly. TweetFull allows you to create promotions through which you can auto-like and auto retweet posts of people that fall under your target audience. It also auto follows and unfollows people from your account on your behalf.
All these actions will create curiosity among people and make them check out your account. Thus, without being actively engaged on the platform, you can make your Twitter account grow by continuously interacting with others and retweeting.
To sum up,
The timing on which you upload tweets can indeed make all the difference between great success and repetitive failure. Review Twitter basics and your posting schedule to better reach and satisfy your target audience. If you’re looking to maximize your social media marketing, you should also take note of the best times to post to Facebook and the best times to post on Instagram for maximum exposure, engagement, and sales.
