Twitter has become an increasingly popular and important tool for businesses to keep in touch with their customers. Twitter is a medium unlike any other. Each tweet has a limited life-span – if it is not read within a short time of its being posted, the chances of it ever being read drop exponentially. The constant stream of new tweets from the group of individuals each twitterer is following makes it unlikely that the tweet will be read if it is a few hours old. For few twitterers capture all of their tweets in RSS feeds, or take the time to examine all the latest tweets from more than a handful of individuals. For a business hoping to broadcast a message that is read my the most followers possible, timing is of the essence.
So then, what is the best time of day to tweet? There have been several approaches to answer this question:
- Gary McCaffrey examined the Twitter referrals to his websites and concluded that any time between 9:00AM and 3:00PM is best.
- Malcom Coles claims that according to his survey, 4:01PM is the best time to tweet.
- Guy Kawasaki recommends posting your most important tweets 4 times, 8 to 12 hours apart.
- The Social Media Guide recommends 9:00AM Pacific Time as the single best time to tweet.
- Hubspot’s “State of the Twittersphere” report indicates that global tweets peak between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM.
As you can see, there are a lot of different opinions about the best time to tweet. In order to develop the best answer possible to this question, I collected data over the course of several weeks for a business whose followers consist primarily of event professionals.
The data set consisted of several thousand tweets, including the username, the time and day of the tweet, and the tweet itself. For the purpose of this analysis, I assumed that the best indicator of a given twitterer’s degree of engagement was whether or not they had tweeted within a given hour. So in order to determine the best time of day to tweet, what is most important is not the number of tweets being posted at a particular time, but the number of unique users posting tweets. Here’s the data, in Eastern Time:
For this group of followers, there are actually two optimal hours to tweet – 10:00 – 11:00 AM and 12:00 – 1:00 PM. Tweets during these two hours reach 23.7% of the total number of followers, an 18% advantage over the next best time, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM, and a 31% advantage over 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM. These increases in total available audience are highly significant to a business with thousands of followers.
Notice that, for this particular group, a tweet during the hour beginning at 9:00 AM, the beginning of Gary McAffrey’s time window, would only reach an available audience that is two-thirds the size of that available during 10:00 – 11:00 AM and 12:00 – 1:00 PM. Malcolm Cole’s suggestion of 4:01 PM reaches an available audience that is less than half the size – only 41% – of that of the best time to tweet. Guy Kawasaki’s formula of four tweets varied over 8 – 12 hour intervals is a hit-or-miss proposition. In this particular case, the Social Media Guide is right on the money – the hour beginning at 9:00 AM Pacific/12:00 PM Eastern is best.
But does this pattern hold for every group of followers? Or does each group of followers have a unique pattern, a sort of “time fingerprint”? To answer this question, I examined a second group of followers of a CRM company. Here’s the data, once again expressed in Eastern Time:
This group is far different! The group following the CRM company is much more likely to be active during the morning hours, and is more evenly distributed over the entire day. As a result, a tweet to this group reaches a maximum of 10.8% of the total available audience, as compared to the group of event professionals, which peaked at 23.7%. The CRM group reaches its maximum at 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM, rather than the hour before or after, as in the previous case. So while a close approximation, the Social Media Guide guideline of 12:00 PM Eastern Time would for this group reach an audience 17% smaller than the peak time period of 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
As these two data sets demonstrate, there is no one best time to tweet for every business. Each business has a unique set of followers with their own Twitter “time fingerprint”. You have to track the habits of your own set of followers in order to determine the best single time of day for your business to tweet.
Develop this graph for your own set of followers. How much different is your group compared to these two?
One of the most important insights from these two examples is that at any given time, you can only reach 10% – 24% of your followers with a single tweet. In a future post, I’ll examine what percentage of a group of followers can be reached with multiple tweets.
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