4.8 million Twitter survey: The most popular Twitter time is 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm

199IT original compilation

When planning your tweets, it’s important to know when you get the most clicks and engagement. Having this information can yield amazing results, and we’re always exploring best practices for social media tweets, such as length, frequency, and timing.

Timing, in particular, is a factor that we need to explore more deeply.

With the help of our data team, we analyzed over 4.8 million tweets from 10,000 profiles registered with Buffer to understand click volume, engagement, and timing at different times of day.

Twitter's Best Moment: 4.8 Million Twitter Survey

Key findings:

• According to the Twitter data collected, the early morning hours are the time when Twitter receives the most clicks;
• Evening and late night are when tweets receive the most favorites and retweets;
• Sometimes the times of highest engagement and most popular tweets are opposite;
• The most popular times to tweet and the best times to engage on Twitter are different, so more experiments are needed to understand the time periods when your audience engages the most.

Most popular tweeting time: 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.

We looked at all of Buffer’s Twitter data to see what the most popular times to post are:

• Among the various time periods, 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm (local time) is the most popular time to post tweets;
• The heaviest amount of tweets are posted between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., with the peak occurring between 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.
• The lowest number of tweets is between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.

The chart below shows the most popular tweet times (local time) for 10 major time zones around the world.

The chart below shows the most popular Twitter times for 4 major US time zones.

(Data normalized to US time)

The chart below shows the Twitter times for major time zones in Europe and Africa.

(Data normalized to London time (GMT))

The chart below shows the Twitter times for major time zones in Asia and Australia.

The most popular Twitter times vary by time zone. The most popular Twitter times in the 10 major time zones are:

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (US Pacific Time): 9:00 a.m.;
• Denver (Mountain Standard Time): noon;
• Chicago (Central Time): noon;
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Western Time): noon;
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central Europe): 4:00 pm;
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern Europe): 8:00 pm;
• Sydney (Eastern Australia): 10:00pm;
• Hong Kong (HKT): 8:00am;
• Tokyo (Japan time): 2:00 am;
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China time): noon.

in conclusion:

• The most popular posting times may be influenced by a number of factors: when most people access Twitter (perhaps using work computers), when netizens are most willing to stay connected, etc.
• Should you post your tweets during the most popular times? This is just one possibility, and you can also be successful by distributing your tweets during off-peak times, when the volume of posts is lower;
• If you have a large international audience on Twitter, you can adjust your posting schedule to suit your readers’ regions. You can also use tools like Followerwonk and Crowdfire to understand when your readers are online.

The best time to get more clicks on Twitter

When did Twitter receive the most hits?

• On average, tweets posted between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning receive the most hits.
• The average time when each tweet receives the highest number of hits is between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning, with the peak occurring between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning;
• The time period with the fewest clicks per tweet is between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., which is the peak time for tweeting.

The following graph shows the number of hits in local time in each time zone around the world, with the peak at 2:00 a.m.

The best time to get clicks on Twitter in major time zones around the world:

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (US Pacific Time): 2:00 a.m.;
• Denver (MT): 7:00 p.m.;
• Chicago (Central Time): 2:00 a.m.;
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Western Time): 11:00 p.m.;
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central Europe): 2:00 a.m.;
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern Europe): 8:00 pm;
• Sydney (Eastern Australia): 2:00am;
• Hong Kong (HKT): 5:00am;
• Tokyo (Japan time): 8:00 a.m.;
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China time): noon.

in conclusion:

• Compared to retweets, replies, and favorites, clicks are not the biggest indicator of engagement;
• Some individual time zone best times show that off-peak hours are actually the best time to get clicks;
• One thing to keep in mind is that off-peak times in Los Angeles may be peak times in London or Paris;
• 2:00 AM is an average of all the data, so it may include some outliers. If you tweet at 2:00 AM, you may get a huge jump in engagement, but you can't expect every tweet posted at this time to get higher clicks.

Best Times to Engage on Twitter

We define engagement as: Engagement = Clicks + Retweets + Favorites + Replies.

The following trends help Twitter gain the most engagement:

• Tweets posted between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning receive the most engagement;
• The time period with the highest engagement per tweet is between 11:00 pm and 5:00 am, with the peak period being between 2:00 and 3:00 am.
• The time period when Twitter receives the lowest engagement is during work hours, which is 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

in conclusion

The best times to get engagement on Twitter are the opposite of the most popular times to post.

The best time to get retweets and favorites on Twitter

Adding these two engagement metrics together, we see some interesting trends, especially for US readers (looking at 1.1 million tweets from US Buffer users between January and March 2015):

• Tweets posted at 9:00 p.m. in the U.S. received the most retweets and favorites;
• The highest amount of forwarding and collection is from 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm, and the peak period is from 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm;
• The lowest number of reposts and favorites is at 3:00 in the morning.

These numbers are slightly different than the global engagement numbers, mainly because: clicks make up a large portion of engagement; and the global and US data sets are different.

Some of the findings were counterintuitive, and one in particular stood out: 2:00 a.m. was the best time for tweets to get clicked on. This is mainly because there are several time zones where tweets get the most clicks in the early morning.

1. The number of followers a Twitter account has has a significant impact on clicks, retweets, or favorites;
2. The type of content, day of the week, and message can also influence engagement.

These additional factors were not controlled for in the study. If the results show that 2:00 to 3:00 a.m. is the time when tweets get the most hits, this is just the average of all tweets received in a specific time zone.

There are two reasons to consider carefully:

1. This means that large accounts with large numbers of followers have a very large influence on the average number of hits per tweet;
2. These large accounts have a particularly large impact on average clicks in the early morning hours due to the large accounts’ higher follower counts and other accounts’ lower tweet volume.

For example, the graph below shows the total amount of tweets from accounts at each follower level in the Eastern European Time Zone (EET).

T06 has large accounts with more than 5,000 followers. These accounts post more frequently than other accounts, and most of them are late at night, while other accounts do not post much during this period. Therefore, we need to break down these data so that the data of large accounts will not disturb other accounts and may be more representative.

And we can look at this data with another handy statistic: the median, which allows us to compare the engagement levels of tweets posted at different times of the day.

The best time to get clicks on Twitter: Another way to look at the data

To control for the impact of large accounts on average engagement, we categorized the number of tweets an account posts and the number of likes those tweets received into seven levels.

In some cases, data outliers are obvious, for example, a tweet from an account with less than 100 followers gets thousands of hits, which indicates that it may be an outlier. In addition, we found that large accounts tweeted more frequently than others at unusual times and had unusual increases in average hits. If removing these from the data may be useful, the figure below shows an example.

After filtering these sections, we found that the best time to get clicks on Twitter is between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (US Pacific Time): 10:00 p.m.;
• Denver (MT): 7:00 p.m.;
• Chicago (Central Time): 2:00 a.m.;
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Pacific Time): 2:00 p.m.;
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central Europe): 5:00 pm;
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern Europe): 5:00 am;
• Sydney (Eastern Australia): 1:00pm;
• Hong Kong (HKT): 5:00am;
• Tokyo (Japan time): 8:00 a.m.;
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China time): 7:00 in the morning.

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