Want more clicks? My new data suggests that you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends.
Continuing the study of Twitter clickthrough rates I started last week, I added over 100 more of the most followed Twitter accounts to my database and indexed click data on over 20,000 bit.ly links Tweeted by those accounts. In all of the data below, I measured CTR as the number of clicks a link received, divided by the number of followers the sending account had on the day it Tweeted it. As I noted in my other post, this number can be over 100% due to ReTweets that may use the same bit.ly link.
The graphs below shows the percentage of difference in CTR at each hour or day from the specific average for each account. I did it this way to account for the wide variation in CTRs between accounts (some accounts have much higher rates than others).
The first data point I analyzed is time of day (EST). It showed the expected afternoon/evening preference seen in my other Twitter stats.
Next I looked at days of the week, which showed a much less expected weekend preference. I believe this is due to the “link fatigue” present during the weekdays, where there is a much higher level of activity and many more links are posted.
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How interesting. It always seems so quiet on the weekends, but apparently not. Good stuff to know though.
actually it's probably that it is so quiet on the weekends. less links flying around means more people clicking fewer links…
interesting facts! saturday normaly is the worst day in ecommerce in germany, people surf the web from there office and they don´t work on saturday
Yeah I think that's the issue at work here.
Excellent and extremely relevant post with tremendously useful, instantly implementable information — thanks ever so much, Dan!
Best,
Christine Elisabeth Hueber
Now I know why I am having fewer clicks in the morning. Guess people are still rushing for work and have no time to tweet. As for the weekends, I always reduced my tweets. Now after reading this I know I made a grave mistake! Thanks for the invaluable insight and research.
In what time zone were you doing these tests?
Dan,
I am following your findings and I think you have honed in on some interesting trends.
There are a couple of points that you don't take into account and I would love to know your thoughts.
I have seen many tweets with links that don't inform the reader (or at least not accurately) the destination of the link. Although I wouldn't send a tweet like that, I think these types of tweet links generate a lot of hits just out of curiousity. I'm not sure if it is done on purpose to get traffic or if the person is just trying to get the tweet out quickly.
I'm wondering if you think the content of the tweet has any impact on the statistics you are collecting. It would be really interesting to see what would happen if the same tweet link was sent out by different people at various times of the day.
Thanks for the info.
Hi this is very interesting and this is very impressed by me
gold bullion
I wonder if there's any difference between tweeting to a B-to-B audience, compared to a B-to-C?
Was wondering what the stats were Dan. Clarifies the Thursday to Saturday and late afternoons. One thing that stood out was Mondays, I thought there would be much more tweeters first thing early morning?
On FB I find Fridays/Saturdays to be the highlights and later on in the afternoon also. Keep them rolling in!
whooaaa, there is science to twitter… think my brain is going to start to hurt!
It seems to be the opposite case this side of asia. Weekday mornings has the highest CTR from what I can gather.
It seems to be the opposite case this side of asia. Weekday mornings has the highest CTR from what I can gather.
Nice statistics, lots of good info about tweets and retweets.
by d way, how do u collect this data, is there a site for this ??
Wow….your a freakin' genius!! Where have you been all my Twitter life…lol Great stuff you have here…never knew!! Wow! Nominating you right now…..
Many people login on twitter on sunday.
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