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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October 27th, 2009 at 6:41 am
How interesting. It always seems so quiet on the weekends, but apparently not. Good stuff to know though.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:29 am
actually it's probably that it is so quiet on the weekends. less links flying around means more people clicking fewer links…
October 27th, 2009 at 8:56 am
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
October 27th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Yeah I think that's the issue at work here.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Excellent and extremely relevant post with tremendously useful, instantly implementable information — thanks ever so much, Dan!
Best,
Christine Elisabeth Hueber
October 28th, 2009 at 1:25 am
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.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:39 am
In what time zone were you doing these tests?
October 28th, 2009 at 7:10 am
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.
October 30th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Hi this is very interesting and this is very impressed by me
gold bullion
October 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I wonder if there's any difference between tweeting to a B-to-B audience, compared to a B-to-C?
October 31st, 2009 at 11:06 am
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!
November 11th, 2009 at 1:42 am
whooaaa, there is science to twitter… think my brain is going to start to hurt!
November 18th, 2009 at 7:07 am
[...] Weekends and Afternoons Show the Highest Twitter CTRs | Dan Zarrella Want more clicks? My new data suggests that you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends. (tags: twitter socialmedia statistics tips) [...]
December 12th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
It seems to be the opposite case this side of asia. Weekday mornings has the highest CTR from what I can gather.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:17 am
It seems to be the opposite case this side of asia. Weekday mornings has the highest CTR from what I can gather.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:48 am
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 ??
February 16th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
[...] Timing is everything – When you decide to advertise your services and products, maximize your conversion rates by scheduling these on the days that have proven to have the highest Click Through Rates when using Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. For instance, a great resource for these statistics is Dan Zarella’s blog entitled Weekends and Afternoons Show the Highest Twitter CTRS. [...]
March 8th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
[...] west coast, but I guess it depends on your target audience; Dan Zarrella has some really good stats here). One of the most click-worthy tweet messages goes something like this: “new blog post: [...]
May 3rd, 2010 at 10:21 am
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…..
May 7th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
[...] themes got the most traction. It was because of this approach that he was able to make assertions like “you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends” to get more [...]
May 31st, 2010 at 11:01 am
[...] and Sunday, followed by Saturday, are the best days for getting click-throughs on your tweets, according to new research by Zarrella. He attributes this to “link fatigue” during the [...]
June 12th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Many people login on twitter on sunday.
July 15th, 2010 at 10:38 am
[...] the highest twitter CTR. As to hour of the day, afternoons and evenings are better. Looking at his data, 2pm-ish and between 8-9pm are the most optimal [...]