Knowing the best times to tweet is vital if you are going to make your time spent on Twitter count as much as possible. You want to get your messages out at a time when they are most likely to be seen and engaged with by your followers, rather than just vanishing into the dark recesses of their feeds.
How Can I Work Out My Optimum Tweeting Times?
Well, why not take a look at what the big names are doing? Here’s a list of the UK companies with the largest followings on Twitter. All these firms will have invested heavily in their social media strategies, and done some seriously in-depth research into the best days and times to post. In the early stages of your Twitter campaign, you could certainly do worse than to take a lead from these big hitting companies.
Using a basic Twitter analytics tool, we can get a visual representation of what times a Twitter user is most frequently posting, and when they get the most retweets and replies. So for example if your business is retail, it is well worth taking a look at which times some of the big chain stores are tweeting, and use their know-how to inform your own strategy.
We can see Waterstone’s (@waterstones) tweets are spread widely throughout the week, but they post with increasingly frequency on Monday and Tuesday after about 4pm. This suggests to me that Waterstones are trying to catch people on the last hour or so of their working day, when they will most likely be online and receptive to Twitter messages.
Seeing all the tweets from Visit Britain (@visitbritain) mapped out like this, what really jumps out is the density of tweets on Friday mornings, between 9am and 12pm. Presumably they know this is when people are planning their weekend activities, and are switched on to ideas coming from social media. Tourism businesses take heed!
When are my Followers Online?
While looking at other companies will give you broad insights, to get a more specific understanding of your own optimum tweeting times you need to look at when your followers are online.
The above graph shows what times the followers for one of our local clients, the Dorchester BID (@DorchesterBID), are most commonly on Twitter during the week. For obvious reasons, the peaks coincide with all the main breaks in the working day (10am teabreak, 1pm lunchtime, 5pm just before clocking off) and then it goes up again in the evening from 7-8pm.
We’ve taken this data and applied it to our social media strategy for the BID, meaning that instead of just taking a scattergun approach to pushing out messages, we now schedule their tweets to hit the peak times their followers are online, giving them the maximum possible exposure.
Of course Twitter is a broad church, and there are no absolute rules for the right or wrong time to tweet. Some times are inevitably better than others though, and it’s certainly worth doing a bit of experimenting to discover which times work best for you.
If you’d like to know more, why not give us a call? We’re one of the leading Dorset social media agencies, and you can reach us Monday to Friday 9am-5pm on 01305 755609.
Chris Redhead
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