What is the Best Time To Tweet? (Updated [date])

What is the Best Time To Tweet? (Updated [date])

Twitter is one of the most important social media platforms of the current era for marketing. With over 70% of people on the platform following at least a single brand, ensuring that your marketing strategy is effective is key to using such a versatile marketing tool as Twitter to your advantage.

At Typefully, we believe that one of the key ways to improve your Twitter marketing strategy is to ensure that you’re tweeting at the most effective time. By tweeting at times when more people will be online, you’ll be able to maximize the number of people who see your tweet and potentially engage with it.

In this article, we’ll discuss when the best time to tweet is, and how companies are getting it right!

Why is the time you tweet important?

Twitter has unbounded potential for marketing. All it takes is one well-timed tweet, and your marketing campaign can go viral.

For example, all of these following ‘brand tweets’ — three tweets that went viral this year — have one constant: they were posted around noon.

We’ll get into the best time to tweet later on, but it’s evident that certain times are better than others for making your tweets garner attention.

So, what is the best time to tweet, and why?

What is the best time to tweet?

Evidently, the best time to tweet is around 12 pm for your audience. Some companies like to tweet in the hour before or after, but midday is the target.

You’ll want to release your tweet early enough that it gains traction by that time, so more people see it.

Amtrak is a great example of a company that uses tweeting at certain times to its full potential.

These tweets are all released at a scheduled time, usually, 12 pm EST, though sometimes at other scheduled times, which we’ll get into later.

This ensures that they hit the right window each time and that the tweets reach as many people as possible. Never missing a beat.

On weekdays, tweeting at noon is crucial. A lot of people work a 9-to-5 job, so they don’t often check Twitter throughout the workday.

At lunch, your content will get its initial buzz. Then, followers will check Twitter once they get off work - providing a second window to make an impact.

Amtrak also tweets on weekends regularly, and often tweets at both midday and in the morning for those days. Tweeting on the weekend is incredibly different, though — the Millennial and Gen-Z audience that the ‘meme’ tweets were directed to might not be available due to weekend jobs.

Because of this, Amtrak puts out more general advertisements and standard marketing to appeal to older people and those less ‘meme-inclined’.

Time Zones

A common worry is tweeting for the ‘wrong’ timezone. After all, 5 pm in New York isn’t 5 pm in Tokyo.

The best way to do this is by strategizing your tweets for your target audience. If your tweet is primarily targeting Americans on the East coast,  tweet at 12 pm EST! If you want to market to people in the United Kingdom, tweet at 12 pm GMT.

For international companies, this may be harder — as you’ll want to try to maximize the number of people who see your tweets worldwide. This is why lots of companies have separate social media accounts for different countries and continents — and have different teams that can publish tweets at the best time in their location.

For example, Amtrak is a trans-American company. Operating throughout the country, they need to be able to reach people all over the United States optimally to be able to effectively deploy their marketing campaign to its maximum potential.

By tweeting at 12 pm Eastern (9 am PT), they do a number of things —

  • Be able to effectively reach their Eastern audience at the correct time.
  • Tweeting at 9 am PT means that people on Pacific time will see the tweet at lunch after it gains traction.

The only way to effectively ensure that their tweets are released at the right time is by using a program to schedule their tweets.Rather than having to constantly tweet for each time zone that you’re targeting and tweeting them at weird times of the night, tweet scheduling tools like Typefully allow you to set up your tweets to send at a specific time, so you can ensure that your company’s crucial tweets go out in the night whilst you’re sleeping.

Best Practices for Scheduling Tweets

Schedule Tweets ‘Naturally’

Rather than having a bunch of similar tweets that are all scheduled to be released at exact hourly intervals, instead, give the illusion that someone is actively tweeting your tweets.

Change up your style of tweets to ensure that they don’t feel too robotic or ‘forced’.

Make sure to spread out your ‘meme’ tweets and your content tweets, as you don’t want to garner a negative reputation for your meme tweets like Denny’s.

Remember, the best time to tweet will vary depending on your audience and niche.

Identify your best performing times

Using Typefully’s best time to tweet tracker can help you find the best time slots for releasing content on Twitter.

You can then easily schedule your tweets based on this information and find when to schedule your posts.

Check Your Scheduled Tweets

Especially when a worldwide event happens, check your scheduled tweets to make sure that nothing unfortunate will be automatically tweeted to damage your brand in the coming hours and days.

For example, this scheduled tweet was released right after the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II —

Just check, and save yourself the embarrassment.

Schedule ‘Ahead of the Curve’

Rather than scheduling a tweet that jumps on a trend to go out weeks late and potentially look out of touch, instead try to stay current and on the ball. Maybe even change your schedule and content calendar to jump on a potential jackpot trend. Be a trendsetter, like Amtrak.

Don’t Be Afraid To Manually Tweet Sometimes

Of course, with scheduled tweets, it can be easy to get into the habit of solely writing tweets two weeks in advance of publishing. However, sometimes you just need to get a tweet out there as soon as possible, whether it be an important trend or just something that you feel needs to be said sooner rather than later.

This is especially important with replies. You can’t schedule replies, so learning to react to the Twitter world is incredibly important for both replying effectively and knowing when to scrap the automated replies.

Use The Right Tools

A social media manager is only as good as their best tool. Twitter’s tweet scheduler is okay. But, most social media managers use external tools to be able to unlock the full potential of Twitter marketing.

Typefully is a great tool for tweet scheduling and management. Our schedule queue allows you to queue up tweets and see an overview of everything you’ve scheduled, so you can easily change things if need be.

How do you judge the effectiveness of your Twitter strategy?

A successful Twitter marketing strategy makes use of data-driven analytics to track the performance of your tweets. Twitter has a basic analytics platform that helps you track your tweets’ impressions and engagement. Advanced third-party analytics tools like Typefully provide suggestions and actionable pointers on where to improve.

Tracking your impressions and engagement data through Typefully’s Grow analytics tab helps you identify which tweets are doing well.

Remember that the time you tweet isn’t the only factor that affects how well your audience engages with your content.

Looking at the data helps you figure out which approaches and formats perform the best - and which are best at converting viewers into followers or even customers.

Master Your Twitter Schedule With Typefully

The time you tweet is just as important as any other aspect of tweeting, if not more so.

There’s a reason why the biggest companies on the platform schedule their tweets to go out at a specific time. Their social media teams all know the best time to tweet. And now, you do too!

So, are you ready to take your Twitter game to the next level? Typefully is an essential tool for any brand looking to conquer Twitter and truly unlock its marketing potential.

With our amazing scheduling and analytics tools, you can easily create a strategy that elevates your brand to new heights. Unlock the power of Twitter threads with our brilliant thread editor. Finally, find new ideas for tweets with our prompt generator.

Get started now and unleash your brand’s Twitter potential!