What is the Best Time to Post a Tweet
What the data says about posting times by day and by audience, and why your own analytics beat any published chart.
Average charts versus local data
Published best-time charts are averages across statistically dissimilar accounts. They are a plausible initial theory and a terrible answer. Because a large, mixed sample was online at 9am Tuesday, for example, open any of those infographics and it says that time is the winner. It is possible that the ones currently following you are European developers, or night shift nurses. The appropriate way to phrase this question is at what time your audience can afford. Well, if you made use of your own analytics and see engagement rate as for example its vanity impressions then in a week or two it answer itself.
Consider the public chart as a preliminary approximation only. How about if you have never posted anything at 7am local — then, you have no data whether this slot works or not. Publish similar posts and schedule them over the course of two or three candidate hours, then wait. The analytics screen has only impressions after fourteen days, what hour made answers and profile clicks. Now, that number matters because the early replies determine if X continues to show the post. Do not waste your time reading guides that say "one size one hour" without actually tracking accounts similar to yours using the same analytics dashboard.
Weekday morning windows
Most published studies show weekday mornings from 8am to 10 am local time perform very well, and if not, a second wind around lunchtime and another in the early evening. Tuesday to Thursday beat Mondays and Friday (at least more often). Those hours coincide with the times people look at phones on their commutes, and again when they are behind a desk. If your followers work 9 to 5 in another industry, your 8:15am post might fall flat. This is your first time slot to test but not an all-time fix; the goal here is to write down the exact send time for each trial posts.
Overall though weekends are a slower time but with less intensity which occasionally can be favourable for the smaller account. If your area is hobbies instead of news then Saturday mid-morning wins easily over a crowded Wednesday 9am. All of Monday morns lost in catch-up scroll. Friday after 3pm local generally degrades as people leave the office. Definitely avoid Friday afternoon and Monday 7am if you are going to be only posting five times a week, until you have data. Use the same post type to compare how one weekend slot performs versus your best weekday hour so you have a fair playing field.
First fifteen minutes
X ranking is hugely dependent on the initial fifteen minutes. The quicker a post gains replies, the more people it reaches. A flat landing will stop streaming. Which is why timing matters, not because its magic at 9 am. If your audience is awake there is a shot in the dark for your post to clear that bar. Those minutes generate no replies, and the post dies—a vibrant text turned into a ghost—if nobody is online. Just look at the notifications tab for the first quarter hour, not the impressions graph.
If the first two comments come in those fifteen minutes, you reply to them yourself. All that extra activity can keep the post in circulation for just a bit longer. If your audience is up and about now, then don't sit on a draft until a "perfect" hour. A decent post at 11.40 beats a perfect one at 9 that nobody reads! If you use a scheduler, schedule it so that when the message is sent, you can be at your keyboard to respond, not during a meeting or asleep.
Analytics hour comparison
Check your analytics and see the hours that your best posts went out, controlled for volume by hour. A daily 9am slot will have higher total impressions compared to a 7pm slot used twice. Engagement / Number of Posts at that hour. Posts are listed in order from newest to oldest date on the analytics screen. Now sort or scan for the ones with high reply rate and like rate, and make a note of what local clock time you sent it (not dashboard clock if different timezone).
Then test deliberately. Spread out posting similar content at two times of the week and use engagement rate instead of straight impressions as a gauge. All of the same topic and length so time is the diffence. For your current audience, 2 weeks of paired tests usually reveals who the winning design is. Choose the hour you can REALLY hold if both the 8am set and the noon time are within a few points (I´d prefer to skip this set than to shoddy out at an even volume.) Just keep those two slots until the sample becomes heavy enough to reputable.
Time zone majority
If your followers are spread across time zones take the middle ground where most sit not optimise for your own clock. If your analytics measures it, access the audience or follower location data and weight the largest cluster. Even if you are in London — a US East Coast majority means 9am Eastern. You post at your 9am then that hits them at 4am and you reckon to the first fifteen minutes. Avoid sending the same post to every zone. One good post at the right time beats three average posts.
Consistency beats timing. Regular, repetitive visits of a specific subject area will always do better than the perfect timing of sporadic posts. A three-times-a-week account on the same theme conditions an audience to expect it to be there. A post every Tuesday and Thursday at your chosen hour is still better than missing ten days, then dropping a perfectly timed thread. Leave that hour something like a repeating reminder. Only change that hour after a complete test cycle, not because one post did poorly over the Christmas break.
Profile history cleanup
What a newcomer witnesses once they click through is more important than the hour that any one post went out. A profile with a recent history that supports that for which you are known converts at an infinitely better rate. By the time they see an on-topic post that fits their schedule, if the last twenty posts are repetitive style rants or previous product launches, the new timely post still loses out on the click. Thursday: Check your profile as a stranger would. Remove the stretches that no longer reflect the account before you work harder to plan it to your full potential. Smoke and mirrors won't repair a timeline that erroneously signals its reader.
This is where TweetSweep comes in, allowing you to purify the periods that do not make sense anymore. Get dates in range, look at the batch and drop months that belong to different account version A next dozen tweets tell one story after a clean up Those new visitors who arrived from a post at just the right moment will encounter continuous work instead of an archive that fluctuates wildly. You only clean up once, and then keep posting to the schedule that you end up measuring. The hour is of consequence only once the profile has lived up to it.