Thursday, July 08, 2010

Best Time to Tweet?

Do you know what the best time to tweet is? Recently a client asked me this question and I am sure there are a lot of you wondering the same thing. When you tweet you want to make sure it reaches a lot of people (can I say that you want to get the biggest chirp for the tweet?).

So I did some research to find out what other have to say and here is what I found
  • According to Gary McCaffry, based on the traffic to his site from twitter, the best time to tweet is anywhere between 9 AM – 3 PM PST.
  • Another blogger, Malcolm Coles, who surveyed 120 twitter users to find out the best time time to tweet,, says that the best time to tweet is 4:01 PM.
  • Social Media Guide says that best time to tweet is 9:00 AM PST, this will allow you to hit people across the globe
  • Fasctompany says that the best time to get Retweeted is 4:00 PM EST. Fast company also lists many other factors that can help in Retweets.
  • According to techandlife.com, if you have a large international following then you should repeat your message, 3-4 times a day to make sure it reaches all your followers. Personally I have not followed this rule but I repeat my message at different times on different days. I guess it is time for me to do some testing.
  • Guy Kawasaki says - “take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. “
  • If you can identify your influencer (I will discuss those tools in another post) on twitter then you can use Tweet o’Clock to figure out when is the best time to reach your influencers.
What does this all means? When should you tweet?

Based on this information I suggest the following
  1. Tweet at 9:00 AM PST (If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 9:00 AM in your time zone).
  2. Tweet again the same message at 1:00 PST (4:00 EST) – (you might skip this if your followers are local.
  3. Tweet again the same message at 4:00 PST( If all of your follower are in one time zone then tweet at 4:00 PM in your time zone).
Analyze the data and see which tweets got the most clicks, @ or RTs. Repeat this few times and see if the pattern holds. If it does then you will know the best time to tweet. Once you figure out the best time, use that time to tweet and vary your other tweet to a different time and see which one works the best (A/B testing of Tweet time).

If tweeting at particular time is an issue then keep track of the day/time you tweet and see if there is a pattern. This experiment should help you determine the best time to tweet for you. You might also be interested in:



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9 comments:

  1. Definitely during the work week, but I have found that I sometimes have more engagement after 8:00 p.m.

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  2. Wow I didn't know this. Thanks.

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  3. Great post Anil.

    Trying to figure out when and how often to tweet for the most impact and reach is very much a mix of art and science.

    At Twitalyzer, we just introduced a new report called "Network Activity, which allows one to see when theirs followers are most active: http://twitalyzer.com/whentotweet.asp?u=anilbatra

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  4. I would interpret the data this way: tweet at 4pm in your time zone. Tweet again at 9am (optional if most of your followers are in your time zone). Afternoon is the best time to be retweeted.

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  5. No mention of weekends?

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  6. Useful information. Thanks a bunch! ;)

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  7. Good article, nice attention to detail as far as timezones.

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  8. Hi Anil,

    Very good information about tweeting on Twitter you have here.

    Thanks very much on how to test your tweets and figure out which times are best for you.

    I wrote a post about Twitter on my blog and inserted a link to this post for everyone.

    I believe sharing and learning the knowledge is a wonderful thing.

    Terry Conti

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  9. if you want to get more activity from twitter you should tweet at the time when your follwers will be active, then u surely gonna be benifited from twitter

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I would like to hear your comments and questions.