I crunched some numbers on my Twitter account to see what the most effective time is to tweet (at least for me). I took a look at the number of clicks on tweets by what time of day and what day of the week for a 2 month time period (August and September) and then averaged them to remove discrepancies due to the number of tweets. Tweets included links to articles by others, my own blog posts, a few promotions and retweets. I took out a couple of retweets that had huge click numbers since I had retweeted a very influential person and clicks were most likely due to their influence. I tweet about a fairly wide range of topics, but the results are interesting….
Number of Clicks per Time of Day – by Day
It looks as if mornings are good early in the week and afternoons are good at the end of the week, although, in general, mornings tend to look better than afternoons. This may be that people check Twitter in the morning when they’re catching up with email and whatnot, and they’re busy with meetings and tasks in the afternoon (I know I tend to be that way).
Number of Clicks per Day – by Time of Day
This really shows the trend towards clicks in the morning (except on Friday). Afternoons in general were worse than mornings and noon (lunch time) is the worst time of all.
Average Clicks per Day
Interestingly enough, when you look at the average clicks per day without looking at the time of day, it’s fairly consistent. The beginning and end of the week have a slight edge over the middle (more work being done in the middle of the week?).
Average Clicks per Hour
If we take the day of the week out of the equation, morning has a clear lead over the afternoon and lunchtime is the clear loser.
The Most Effective Time to Tweet?
Looking at the data as a whole, mornings appear to be the most effective times to tweet, especially earlier in the week. While promotions should only be a small portion of your content, they may get the most attention in the morning early in the week. Unfortunately there really isn’t a good way to get at this data without doing some good old number crunching. It probably isn’t worth doing all the time, but you may want to do it once in awhile (or at least once) just to see how your own audience behaves.
What’s your most effective time to tweet? How do you know?
(photo by Jose and Roxanne)