Despite Twitter’s move to a quasi-chronological timeline, the average half-life of a Tweet isn’t long. According to an analysis by Wiselytics, it’s only 24 minutes—nearly four times shorter than the 90-minute half-life of a Facebook post.
“For Facebook, a post reaches 75 percent of its potential engagement in five hours. A median Tweet reaches this 75 percent mark in less than three hours,” Wiselytics says.
This relatively small window of opportunity for engagement means your Tweets need to get out in front of as many eyeballs as possible—when the largest portion of your target audience is using Twitter.
Knowing when that is will take a bit of trial and error (more on that later), but to get you started, here’s what @Hootsuite’s own data suggests based on an analysis of over 40,000 tweets:
- The best time to post on Twitter is at 3 p.m. Monday to Friday.
“As a B2B organization, we find the best times to Tweet are between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays, with the highest amount of clicks and Retweets occurring at 3 p.m.,” explains Hootsuite social media marketing specialist Amanda Wood.
But again, this will differ depending on your audience, location, and content strategy. The Huffington Post, for example, says 5 p.m., 12 p.m., and 6 p.m., are the best times for Retweets, while 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. also deliver higher click-through rates. Kissmetrics says weekdays at 5 p.m. are most effective, and Hubspot came to the same conclusion as we did: 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Friday is best.
You should use these times as a starting point, test different posting schedules and measure the results. Here are three things to consider as you go about finding the best time to post:
1. Location matters. If you are trying to reach a global audience, create a Twitter handle for each region and use a social media management tool to run them all from the same platform. Be sure to create social media reports to track when you get the most engagement for each Twitter handle.
2. Use the right tool. There are numerous tools out there to help you find the best time to Tweet, such as Hootsuite’s AutoSchedule which chooses a time based on when your Tweets have performed the best. You can AutoSchedule from both the dashboard and the Hootlet extension.
3. Know your audience. How old are they? Where do they live? What do they do for work? What’s their commute like? What do they do in their free time? Answer those questions and it will be much easier to nail down the best times to post on Twitter, as well as every other social network. Our how-to blog post on creating audience personas, and the guide below will help you do that.
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