Weekends and Afternoons Show the Highest Twitter CTRs

Oct 27th 2009 View Comments




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.

If you liked this post, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed or my email newsletter so you never miss the science.

Take this quick survey and tell me what social media data you'd like to see me analyze.

Buy Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas today!