What Is The Best Time To Post On Twitter In 2021
The best time to post on Twitter is 9 am on Wednesdays and Fridays. In fact, research suggests these times are perfect for driving engagement to your tweets.
Conversely, you’ll drive poor engagement when posting between 10 pm to 4 am daily since your audience tends to be sleeping (and, therefore, unavailable) during this time. The safest time to tweet, therefore, is during the workday — 8 am to 4 pm from Monday through Friday.
This makes sense as people tend to be active on social media during the day. And, that’s when they expect to hear from brands too. The question now is: do these timings really get you good engagement on Twitter?
Let’s answer that for you in this guide. We’ll also look at four active brands’ Twitter accounts to see when they post to get a rough idea of the best times to tweet. Best of all: we’ll dive into how to make sure you get your audience’s attention each time you post.
Dig in.
The research behind the best time to post on Twitter
The research you read above drives home a simple message: post when your audience is active. Generally speaking, your audience tends to be active and tweeting during the day. However, the key is to find the exact times when your audience is active.
Let’s say you run a local café. When do you think it’s the best time to tweet for such a business? In the morning, because that’s when your audience wakes up and is likely looking to grab a hot cup of coffee. If you have a SaaS business though, your audience wouldn’t mind an early evening tweet.
Hence, when it comes to answering exactly when is the best time to post on Twitter, only you can tell since you know your audience best. Some questions that pop up here are:
- Are you targeting a local or an international audience?
- What does your audience’s schedule look like?
- When is your audience likely to be active on Twitter?
Recruiters, for example, tend to be active on the social network in the morning. But you’ll find working mothers making the time to use the app late in the day. Similarly, you need to be mindful of your time zone. If you’re based in the Middle East but are targeting a UK audience, you’ll need to post according to your audience’s time zone (BST).
Put simply, revisit your buyer’s persona (demographics, in particular) to identify possible times when your audience will likely be active on Twitter. Match these with the best times to post according to research and identify a few tweeting times. From there, experiment to find out exactly when your audience tends to be active.
The best time to post on Twitter: A case study of 4 Businesses
With that, let’s look at how other brands tweet including how often and when. Remember: you don’t have to follow them exactly since your industry may vary and your audience will most definitely be different too.
1. Notion
Notion doesn’t have a strictly defined tweeting schedule. They either post daily or take a one-day posting gap to post another day. The interesting bit: they don’t tweet in bulk. Visit the Notion Twitter account to see that they typically post once during the day or, at the very most, twice.
Keep in mind that posting once daily doesn’t mean the account isn’t active for the rest of the day. It is — engaging with their audience (evident from the retweets sprinkled between tweets), responding to brand mentions (tag them to see for yourself as I have in the past), and getting back to customer questions (check out their ‘Tweets & Replies’ section).
2. Grammarly
Like Notion, Grammarly doesn’t have a strict tweeting schedule. However, their Twitter posting schedule is well-defined, in that they post twice during the day almost daily. They might skip a Saturday at times, but the account usually celebrates resting and recharging over the weekends or sharing #SundayThoughts:
In fact, they often tap into popular day-related hashtags such as #FridayFeeling, #WeekendVibes, and #MondayMotivation among others. Other hashtags they use are #amwriting, #writingtips alongside trending ones such as #MentalHealthAwarenessMonth
On some days, they tweet once. But, needless to say, the team behind Grammarly’s Twitter profile is pretty active in responding to brand mentions.
3. Shopify
The e-commerce giant has a very loose posting schedule on Twitter. Some weeks they post back to back. Other days, there’s a 2–3-day gap. Whatever the posting day, Shopify usually tweets once on any given day.
At times, they might share a thread update too like the one below:
There’s also an occasional retweet with comments in their feed.
That said, the Shopify team is incredibly engaging with their Twitter audience — responding to their comments and supporting them.
4. Innocent Drinks
Of all the Twitter accounts we’ve analyzed so far, Innocent Drinks has the most loosely defined Twitter posting schedule. Again, they’re very active on a daily basis, but when it comes to their tweets, there’s no strong schedule that they seem to be following.
On some weeks, they post every 2 days: Other weeks, they tweet daily. Occasionally, there’s a tweet on the weekend. And, if there’s a relevant hashtag, they even tweet all day long as they did for #EuroVision.
The takeaway from these businesses? We have a handful:
- Posting times for each business vary depending on where their audience is located, who they are, and when they’re active on Twitter.
- You don’t need to stick with a strict posting schedule — a loose one would do. But, don’t forget; you need to be active on a daily basis to engage with your audience and answer any questions they may have (this is all the more important if you’re focused on improving your social media customer service).
- Create tweets that are relevant to your audience so they can engage with you. Also, engagement isn’t one-sided — you’ve got to retweet relevant content and respond to comments too.
- Leverage trending or evergreen hashtags only if they are relevant to your audience and business.
In short, it’s essential you tweet consistently. Best you start by creating a social media content plan so you have a clear idea of what to publish, how to engage with your audience as well as how to self-promote yourself without coming across as overly salesy.
With the blueprint ready, set up a social media content calendar to follow a posting calendar with pre-baked tweets. This saves you time since you don’t have to decide what to tweet daily and allows you to be consistent too.
One more tip to tweet regularly: use a social media scheduler like ContentStudio that can schedule tweets to go out at a time when your audience is active. This way, you won’t miss posting on Twitter if you are neck-deep into social media audits or any other work.
With that said, let’s move to discuss how to get engagement on your content every time you post.
Social Media Calendar For Digital Agencies
Organize all your social posts and visualize your client’s social media content plan with an interactive Content Calendar.
How do Increase engagement each time you tweet?
Follow these tips as you use Twitter and write content for it.
1. Grow your audience
The reason I don’t say ‘grow your followers’ instead is simple; growing your brand on Twitter isn’t a numbers game. It’s
that
simple.
Here’s how you can build an audience. One, tweet relevant (and helpful) content consistently. Two, engage with your followers — it’s what keeps them around and, eventually, converts them into paying customers. If not, they’d probably recommend your business to an interested friend or colleague, generating word-of-mouth referrals.
So how exactly do you engage with your followers to grow a dedicated audience that loves each tweet you send out? Try these tactics:
- Ask questions. These could be audience-related as Shopify does in this tweet:
Or, ask product-related questions as Microsoft does here:
- Reply to the comments on your tweet. I’ve seen tons of brands that don’t do so and it does nothing but signal interested folks to NOT engage with you.
- Share your audience’s content. Either retweet it directly or retweet with a comment.
- Track your brand mentions and respond to them (this is essential for both negative and positive mentions). Doing so helps you grow brand enthusiasts too!
- Poll your audience. This is a helpful way to not just interact with your audience but gather feedback too.
- Join Twitter chats. Take a page from Biteable when it comes to engaging via Twitter chats:
2. Consider hosting a Twitter chat
Speaking of Twitter chats, once you’ve made lots of relationships with your target audience on other chats, consider starting your own.
However, before you rush: it’s crucial to do your homework. Ask yourself:
- Does my audience really need another Twitter chat?
- What will the chat cover?
- How do we plan to engage and give back to the Twitter chat community we build?
- What time would you host this chat?
At the same time, ask your audience if they’d be interested in a Twitter chat. Scrap the idea completely if the initial response to your research is poor — nobody wants to invest resources in something that likely won’t pay off.
Alternatively, if the response you get is neutral, consider hosting a trial Twitter chat for a quarter. Determine if you should consider carrying on with the chat based on the response you get.
So how does a Twitter chat get people to engage with your tweets? Such a chat helps you build a community that interacts with your content and helps spread the word too (remember: retweets expose your business to new audiences and building a community is a good answer to getting retweets on Twitter).
3. Share content that educates, entertains, and shows your brand personality
So far, among the types of tweets that drive engagement, we have question-based tweets and those that poll your audience. Here are three more tweet styles to add to your content bucket:
- Tweets that educate and inform
This means you either teach something in a tweet (or Twitter thread) as Todoist does:
And, share updates to keep users/customers informed.
- Tweets that entertain
It’s also essential you make an occasional entertaining tweet to keep things light and human — such tweets fall into the category of most-liked tweets of all time since they offer a blend of personality, your human side as well a few behind-the-scenes (BTS).
Here’s a wonderful example:
- Tweets that show your brand personality
The goal here is to showcase your human side and brand values. A BTS tweet content that shows a day in your life or ‘here’s how we’ve been working on product line X’ impresses your audience.
Similarly, you can share what you stand for — just as Stripe has done in this tweet:
Bonus: When curating tweets, make sure you’re either adding your opinion on the curated content or mention what it offers as opposed to simply tweeting a link. Here’s a complete guide to content curation.
4. Give back to your followers
Here’s another way to keep your Twitter audience engaged and happy: don’t just take, take, take — return as well. How? Plan occasional discount codes for them, host giveaways, and plan content to help them; for instance, webinars.
Bear Notes App organized a great giveaway relevant to their brand as well as their target users.
It’s also a good idea to celebrate your audience or a slice of them if your target audience is vast.
5. Pair up with Twitter influencers and brand ambassadors
This helps you tap into new audiences. The best part? Influencers typically have highly engaged audiences, which means any people coming your way through them are likely going to engage with you too. On the plus side moreover, you’ll get more exposure for your brand.
If you can’t find industry-relevant influencers to collaborate with, consider giving credit where it’s due. Slack, for instance, worked with a creator for their emojis design so they both shared the news by tagging each other in their tweets. The result? Both parties got exposure to unique audiences.
Slack:
6. Get your employees involved
This is another way to get more eyeballs and engagement on your tweets. Plus, it shows your business’ humane side as well. Overall, it helps you build a community around your content, employees, and target audience.
Here’s an excellent, product-centered (but humane at the same time) Twitter thread from a Notion employee:
Similarly, the Ahrefs’ team takes the time to not just share their insights and experiences, but also posts from the company’s blog.
Similarly, freelancers writing for Ahrefs do the same — helping everyone involved grow:
Keep in mind: not all employees make company-related posts. Incentivizing them can help though. To this end, developing a company culture of sharing, supporting each other’s growth, and encouraging employees to grow their personal brands is a good idea. Here’s more on employee advocacy on social media.
7. Play with different content formats
Lastly, add variety to the tweets you create — this will always help you grow your engagement. Besides, it also tells you which format your audience likes the most so you can double down on creating more of it.
Formats you can try include videos, GIFs, memes, and even TikTok videos. Here’s an epic example of a tweet educating its audience with an attention-grabbing video:
And here’s Shopify sharing an audience-relevant, entertaining TikTok video:
Another amazing video-tweet idea is to create a screen recording based video or one that features your product like this:
As for GIFs and graphics, consider designing branded assets to stand out from the crowd and leave a memorable impression. Branded visual assets also show you’ve put in the work, therefore, garnering more engagement.
The goal is simple: create a visually appealing Twitter feed that your audience wants to follow and interact with. And, don’t forget to write tweets in your brand voice. Brands like Grammarly and Innocent Drinks quickly stand out on account of their unique voice — you can too!
How often should you post on Twitter?
Our case studies on the four brands above make it crystal clear: you don’t need too many tweets to stay on top of your audience’s mind. 1–2 tweets daily or one tweet every other day work best. It’s okay to take it to 3 tweets in a day too. But, increase your tweet frequency only when there’s something you have to say or when there’s a relevant hashtag that’s trendy as Innocent Drinks did.
Whatever tweeting frequency you settle on, make sure you aren’t adding to the clutter. Aim to always add value instead.
One last question before we wrap this up. How much tweeting is too much? Tweeting too much typically means you aren’t sharing high-quality content. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to tweet so much since you should always be aiming to share valuable content.
What’s more, the idea behind consistent tweeting is to stay on your audience’s mind — educating them, entertaining them. If you are tweeting way too much you might end up doing just the opposite — frustrating your followers with a tweet overload.
So, it’s best to start with 1–2 tweets daily. If you have to turn up your tweet volume, aim for three tweets per day at most.
So What is the best time to post on Twitter?
Our research shows that the:
- Best times to post on Twitter: 9 am on Wednesdays and Fridays
- Worst times to post on Twitter: 10 pm to 4 am daily
- The safest time to post on Twitter: 8 am to 4 pm from Monday through Friday
Typing it all together
Summing up, the best time to post on Twitter depends on when your audience is active on the platform and where they are located. For the tweeting frequency or the number of tweets to post, consider 1–2 posts daily a good starting point.
At the end of the day though, you’ll need to experiment a bit with the timings to tweet so you can nail the exact time when your target audience will be more likely to see your content.
Whatever you settle on, don’t forget to be consistent and focus on creating quality, audience-relevant tweets that encourage engagement.
