I’ve been active on Twitter for 5 years now. That surely doesn’t make me an early adapter, but it’s fair to say I’ve long left the newbie stage behind me. Still, even for experienced users, Twitter can be a tough social medium for engagement. It’s easy to tweet, certainly, but to get clicks on your tweeted links, favorites or even retweets, that’s a whole different ball game.
It’s one of the reasons why I dig research on best practices in using Twitter. Buffer, the company behind the Buffer App—which you should start using if you don’t already—regularly releases insights into using Twitter. They analyze millions of tweets to find what works best. And because we’re ChurchMag and we like to make things easy for you, let me recap their findings on best practices in using Twitter.
Best Time to Tweet
Let’s start with some key insights from Buffer into the best times to tweet. On average, the late evening and early morning hour tweets receive the most clicks—we’re talking between 2 and 4 am here for some time zones and 11 pm for eastern time! This seems odd and it’s certainly no guarantee that every tweet around that time will result in major traffic, but it shows that experimenting might pay off. The key thought is that tweeting on off-peak hours is a good shot at getting traffic.
Evenings and late nights score best in terms of favorites and retweets.The key takeaway here is that peak hours are bad for engagement, so your best shot is to tweet during off hours. I’ve seen this myself by the way. I use a plugin that random tweets blog posts from my archives, which means it frequently tweets them in the middle of the night. Much to my surprise this has resulted in major engagement a few times!
Between 11 am and 1 pm is the peak in tweets in each US timezone (with the exception of Pacific Time, where it’s between 8 and 9 am), with the highest volume between noon and 1 pm. Tweeting during that time may decrease the odds of your tweet being seen and read.For most of Europe, the peak is around 4 pm by the way, so if you’re aspiring an international audience, study the peaks in the various time zones.
Best Length of Tweets
By nature, each tweet is limited to 144 characters. But does the length of a tweet influence its impact? Why, yes it does. Research shows that tweets between 71 and 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate.
This makes sense, since shorter tweets make it easier to retweet them with a little comment—though that has changed a bit since Twitter introduced the option of ‘quoting’ someone else’s tweet.
Best Frequency of Tweets
This is where it gets really interesting. There’s a fine line between invisible and utterly annoying. Most people don’t mind seeing the same tweet twice, but more than that is irritating.
The same is true for tweeting frequency in general. Tweeting regularly is fine—especially if you spread them out, which is where the Buffer App comes in handy—but nobody likes to be flooded with tweets from a single person or account. So where’s the sweet spot?
Again, research helps us find answers. If you’re looking at a maximum engagement per tweet, the sweet spot seems to be between three and five tweets per day. This is the point where you get the most engagement compared to your time investment.
However, if your goal isn’t maximum engagement per tweet, but maximum engagement in general—meaning you have more time to invest than three to five tweets a day—you can certainly tweet more. Here the magic number is 30 tweets per day. Anything more than that and people will unfollow you for flooding their timelines.
The rationale behind this is simple: the more you tweet (but up to 30 tweets per day), the more possibilities you create for engagement with followers.
Jesse says
Great stuff. Really helpful for me and my church. Thanks a ton!
Rachel Blom says
You’re very welcome! Grateful to be of service 🙂
Eric Dye says
SUPER helpful.
Rachel Blom says
Glad to hear 🙂