The Best Times to Tweet for Max Engagement

Many Twitter users use the social network to read up on the early morning news. Others haunt the platform late into the night, tweeting their profound ponderings and weighing in on heated debates. And then of course there are the lunch breakers who quickly scroll their feed midday between projects and meetings. 

Although any of these times may be considered the best time to post on Twitter, it does not mean you will get maximum engagement. To break it down for you, we will go over some of the best times to Tweet with the highest likelihood your followers will engage with your posts. 

Tweet for Highest Engagement

We all want to be connected and engaged with our Twitter followers. But just because the platform is active does not mean it is the optimal time your followers will retweet, comment, and share your tweets. Knowing the difference in these times is imperative for social media strategy; it could significantly increase your engagement rates. 

The “best” times to post on social media is a subjective topic. What is “best” for you depends on what you want to accomplish with your social media marketing strategy. If your goal is higher engagement, you’ve come to the right platform! Twitter is ideal for starting conversations with your followers and building a relationship with the audience. 

However, Twitter’s engagement rates are a little trickier than if you post on Facebook. Facebook has more time to impact its audience, while Twitter posts can quickly fall to the bottom of the Twitter feed within minutes. Influencers on Twitter must post constantly to get their content seen at just the right time. 

On the other hand, a post on Instagram will have some of the most engaged users of all the social media platforms due to the lack of clickable links in captions or ads to distract them. But Twitter is full of blog posts, articles, videos, and tons of clickable links that can distract the user away from the app. 

In the beginning, content creators have a tough job getting users to notice their content and engage. The lifespan of a tweet depends largely on the following you have. All the more reason your scheduling game needs to be on point!

The Best Times to Tweet

So let’s get to it. We know that all the piles of data out there about when to post on Twitter can be a bit confusing. We are here to parse through the results of different data sources. Sprout Social concludes the best time to post on Twitter are Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 9 AM.

The best days to post on Twitter were Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The worst days to post on Twitter were Sundays. People tend to tweet most between noon and 1 PM local time. They tweet the least between 3 AM and 4 AM. Hootsuite’s research indicated the best times to post on Twitter are between 9 AM and 4 PM Mondays and Thursdays, most notably the peak times between 11 AM and 1 PM. 

On average, the social network has the most active users between 11 AM and 1 PM every day. This can vary by time zone, however. By most popular time zones, the platform is most active at: 

• 8 AM-9 AM PT
• 12 PM-1 PM MT
• 12 PM-1 PM CT
• 12 PM-1 PM ET
• 8 PM-9 PM EET
• 4 PM-5 PM CET
• 8 AM-9 AM Hong Kong
• 10 AM-11 AM Australia

What are the Best Times to Tweet for Maximum Engagement?

As we’ve alluded to, just because the platform is most active does not mean Twitter users are most engaged. When we talk about Twitter engagement, we specifically mean clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies. Let’s take a look at how this data may vary. 

Sprout Social’s best times to tweet for the most engagement are Wednesdays and Fridays, with the best time to tweet at 9 AM CST on those days. The worst day of the week to tweet for the most engagement was Saturday. Any time on the weekends would be considered the worst time to tweet for engagement. 

Buffer said that Tweets sent out between the time frame of 2 AM and 3 AM would get the highest engagement. The data shows that tweets get the most engagement between 11 PM and 5 AM. The least engagement came when most people had typical work hours on weekdays, between 9 AM-5 PM. 

If you made an audible groan thinking that you’ll have to wake up in the witching hours to post, not to worry! There are plenty of apps out there that can help you schedule tweets and get your beauty rest. Preplan your content calendar, batch a bunch of content and let the scheduler do the work for you.

Finding the Best Time for Your Tweets

Now that we’ve flung all the data at you, it is time to find out when is the best time of day for YOU to tweet. Every audience is different, so it’s important to find your own best times that work. There is a complex mix of reasons people access the platform at the time they do.

Typically they are either commuting to work, eating lunch, commuting home, or late-night scrolling. For this reason, many Tweeters post at these specific times. However, think about the sheer volume of Tweets during social media rush hour. Your Tweet may get lost in the crowded algorithm scramble.

That is why sometimes posting at non-peak hours might be successful. You also need to think about where your Twitter target audience is located. If you have a following that spans continents, you might want to adjust your posting schedule to cater to where your followers are.

Check your Twitter analytics to find out more about where your target audience hails from, then optimize your posting schedule based on those metrics. 

Make Room for Trial and Error

An important part of social media marketing strategy is to post at the right time. But just because there are a lot of users online does not mean there will be the most engagement. Maybe not surprisingly, the late-nighters are the most likely to engage with your Twitter account, between 2 AM and 3 AM. 

We recommend scheduling your tweets at this time and then adjusting based on any new evidence that comes in. No answer is definite, after all, social media management is all about trial and error. Try Tappie today!