What Time of Day is Best to Post Your Social Marketing Content to Twitter?

Twitter is easily one of the best tools a marketer can lean on to stay in touch with their audience and grow their business. This unique platform has many great attributes, but none is more known than the tweet, a simple yet powerful feature that allows you to communicate and share your marketing content with the world. Everyone from regular people to high profile celebrities are using Twitter to let their voice be heard, and all this activity has made it even more attractive from a business perspective. The power of the tweet can’t be denied, but what is the best time of day to actually post your marketing content? Inquiring minds want to know.

According to findings that have been published over the last couple of years, the best time to post on Twitter could range from anywhere between 9 am to 3 pm and 4:01 pm on the nose to 9:00 am Pacific Time to 10 through 11 pm. As you can see, there is no clear cut answer as far as what is the best time. For this reason, you need to take certain actions that are necessary to determine what works best for your individual situation.

Find Out When Your Influencers are Online

A tweet can be highly effective, but one could argue that a retweet is even more valuable. If you really want to get the most exposure for your marketing content, it would behoove you to find out when your influencers are online and base your timing strategy on their presence. How do you do this? Simple. Get to know your most engaged followers. By monitoring their Twitter behavior, you can learn when they are likely to be online and more importantly, when they are most likely to interact with your marketing content.

Track Your Links

You can also get a feel for what is the best time to post your marketing content on Twitter by tracking your links. For instance, if you are trying to generate hype and traffic from your latest blog entry, you could monitor its link to see how many people are clicking on it, sharing it, and interacting with it in other ways at what time of day. This can be done by simply shortening the link to that post with a URL shortener such as bit.ly, which allows you to see how many users clicked on your link and when.

Use the Right Tools for the Job

Last but not least, another effective way to determine the best time of day to send out tweets is to use third-party sites that were designed for this purpose alone. There are actually quite a few options available to you, including Timely, TweetWhen, and WhentoTweet among others. Many of these tools are totally free to use and surprisingly effective when it comes to helping you figure out the optimal time to post your marketing content to Twitter.

Always remember that the time of day that gets the next marketer tons of attention may not necessarily be right for you. You must develop your own strategy to find out what works. Hopefully these tips will point you in the right direction.

Francis is a best practices activist and advocate for leading web and permission-based email marketing software. Francis can also be contacted via Twitter.