
Businesses are increasingly using Twitter to promote their brands and drive traffic to their sites. With Twitter becoming such a powerful advertising tool, it is imperative that businesses utilize it in a way that will enable them to reach the largest audience. The problem that businesses face is that their direct tweets can only be viewed by the amount of followers that they have. If your goal is to expand your audience, then you need a way of reaching those who are not currently seeing your tweets.
The solution to this problem is simple, yet complex: getting retweets. Using Twitter to engage your current audience can result in them retweeting your material, which in turn leads to a larger viewing audience. The process of receiving retweets is not as simple as it seems, otherwise businesses would be able to reach all twitter users. So the question is… How can you harness the power of receiving retweets? Analysis has shown that timing plays a big part.
The Best Time to Get Retweets
The Best Days to Tweet
At TrackMaven, we recently released The Retweet Report, which analyzed 1,423 Twitter accounts and over 1.7 million tweets. This produced some interesting results.
Currently, Twitter users are tweeting more often during the week. This may be because on weekends people are not sitting at their work desk, or they are preoccupied with some other activity, but for whatever reason, there is a higher tweet frequency during the weekdays. The analysis shows that whereas fewer than 10 percent of users’ tweets are sent out on Saturday and Sunday, midweek tweeting percentages are above 15 percent, with Thursday being the pinnacle at 17.4 percent. Tuesday and Wednesday were only slightly lower, coming in at 17.2 percent for both days.
Although tweet frequency is highest on the weekdays, the study has shown that retweets occur more often on the weekend than during the week. Sunday has the highest average retweet rate, with Sunday tweets garnering 0.168 retweets. If businesses are trying to get more retweets, it is time that they reconsider their tweeting strategy. With a lower volume of tweets on the weekend compared to the week, it is more likely that your tweets will be seen in your followers twitter feed. By publishing more tweets on the weekend, you can capitalize on theses statistics to reach a larger audience.
The Best Time to Tweet
Playing off the high tweet frequency during the work week, the times with the highest tweet frequency are during the workday, probably because people are sitting in front of their computers at work. The volume of tweets increases dramatically after 9am and peaks between 12-1pm ET, with 12-1pm representing 8.01 percent off all tweets sent out during the day.
Although it is easier to tweet during work, if you are looking for retweets, you will find more success in the after-work hours. The amount of retweets increases later in the night, climaxing between 10-11pm at an average of .194 retweets, whereas the retweet frequency during work hours is significantly lower. Businesses should put in the after hours effort to increase their chances of receiving retweets.