So what are the best times to tweet? It depends on your audience, it depends on your geographic location - it depends on a whole range of factors that are, to some degree, unique to you and/or your brand. The best way to determine your optimum times to tweet is to do a Twitter analysis and work out when your audience is online - but even then, should you tweet at the peak time the majority of your audience is online, or will that make it more likely that your tweets get lost in the noise of everyone being active at once?
The team at Buffer know your pain, and lucky for you, they've done a heap of the groundwork, examining more than 4.8 million tweets to narrow down the best tweet times based on location, activity and tweet outcomes - whether you're after more re-tweets, link clicks or replies. While users should still need to examine their own data to come up with their definitive best tweet times (the only rule of social media is that 'your audience rules'), the latest Buffer study is one of the best I've seen at breaking down the data into actionable subsets, and it may open your eyes to the possibilities of tweeting at different times.
The results are broken down in the below infographic - the best time to tweet for overall engagement is 2am to 3am, who'd have thought?
The Buffer study also looked at the most popular times to tweet - when the most people are actively tweeting - in various regions across the world. Interesting to see the geographic variances in most popular tweet times.
There's a heap of data in the full report on Buffer, and it's worth having a look through the team's explanations to get further context on the best times to post - higher engagement between 2am to 3am, for example, is relative to the average amount of clicks for all tweets in that time zone, at that time, which does change things a little. Either way you look at it, there's some interesting insights in the data, insights that might make you re-think your own Twitter strategy and consider new possibilities and options - or maybe just inspire you to broaden your tweet horizons and conduct your own tests.