If you are trying to grow your presence on Twitter, you’re probably wondering when is the best time to tweet, so you can get the most value out of this social network.
There is a myriad of blogs and infographics dedicated to the subject. Many of them mark 9am, 12pm, and 3pm as the best time to tweet. But before using those times for your company’s Twitter handle, your brand must consider some important factors: where in the world are you located? What kind of tools are you using to find the best times to tweet? Are you engaging enough on social media to test which times work best?
So we decided to go a different route, and help you find the optimal time to tweet tailored for your company. The following information isn’t going to tell you when the best time to tweet is; instead, it will equip you with the right tools to figure out the best time to tweet for your business’ Twitter accounts.
Here are 3 tips to find out the best time to tweet for your business
Tip #1: Your geographic location matters
The best time to tweet in Vancouver, Canada is not going to be the same as London, England. So when discovering the best time to tweet, it is important to factor in your geographic location. This is extremely important if your business goal for this year (or next) is to expand into a different region. One useful strategy is to create a Twitter handle per region, use a social media management tool to manage and monitor all of them in one place, and then create social media reports to track when you get the most engagement per Twitter handle. These reports will allow you to estimate when your Twitter followers are online and engaging with your Tweets.
Tip #2: Use the right tool
There are many available statistics that describe the best times to tweet. Those are great, but they may not work for everyone, especially for people just starting out their company’s Twitter account. For small businesses, the best times to tweet can be found using various tools; here are three to get you started in discovering the best time to tweet for your business.
1. SocialBro
One of the most useful features in SocialBro is their ‘Best Time to Tweet’ report. Their free version, which is good for beginners on Twitter, analyzes the timelines of your top 100 followers. They then generate a report that shows when you should be tweeting to reach the maximum amount of followers, in order to gain retweets and replies.
With SocialBro’s integration in Hootsuite, you can find your best time to tweet directly in the Hootsuite dashboard via the SocialBro App. You can then schedule your Tweets accordingly, to expand your reach by posting during the times when your followers are online.
The Hootsuite Autoschedule does the work for you when it comes to choosing the best time to tweet. The Autoschedule tool chooses a time based on when your Tweets have performed the best. You can Autoschedule from both the dashboard and the Hootlet extension.
Once you use the Autoschedule for one week, review your scheduled messages and take note of the times the Autoschedule used. This information will allow you to plan out when to schedule your messages in the future. To demonstrate this, the image below highlights that times that my messages were Autoscheduled. I can now note that the optimal times for my Twitter handle is around noon and at 3pm.
This Hootsuite feature that can also help you find the best time to tweet. These social media reports will help small businesses find when they are getting the most retweets or mentions. You’ll also be able to discover where the majority of your audience is located, so you can adjust your strategy for tweeting at the best time to reach them. By using this data, you’ll be able to gauge when the best time to tweet is for your company’s Twitter handle.
For example, the image below highlights when one Twitter handle is receiving the most retweets, with its corresponding ‘Clicks by region’ module. The left module shows when I’m getting the most retweets and the right module shows me where I’m getting the most clicks. These two modules together now allow me to answer the question, “Why am I getting lots of retweets later in the afternoon and late at night my time?”
Tip #3: Make sure you engage on social media
Knowing when the best time to tweet for your company’s Twitter handle starts with social media engagement. This is a core part of any social media strategy, and shouldn’t be a passive experience. If you’re just publishing content and not engaging, your followers will also not take the action to engage with your tweets. Therefore, you won’t be able to accurately take note of the best time to tweet, and the tips above will be useless to you. Rather than waiting for people to engage with you, initiate the conversation, so you can turn your followers into brand advocates, and garner more retweets and mentions.