The excitement of publishing a post on Twitter can quickly diminish when you realize nobody’s engaging with it. You picture your followers’ reactions to your carefully crafted tweet, but they don’t see it. If you want to boost your odds of getting your content in front of the right people, you’ve got to figure out how to go viral on Twitter. One of the most effective ways to do this is to post at the right time. This guide will walk you through the best times to post on Twitter to boost your social media engagement and how to go viral on Twitter.
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What Is The Best Time To Post On Twitter?
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Mondays
Every day of the week, from 8 a.m. until about 7 p.m., sees average engagement on X. However, on Mondays, specifically, we saw a few hours in the morning as the highest engagement. The best time to post on X on Monday is between 9 a.m. to noon.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Tuesdays
Tuesdays see three times the highest engagement than Mondays, which span the morning to early afternoon. The best times to post on X on Tuesdays are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Wednesdays
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays have higher engagement periods than any other day. However, average engagement periods extend further into the evenings on Wednesdays. The best times to post on X on Wednesdays are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Thursdays
Like Wednesdays, the best times to post on X on Thursdays are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Fridays
Surprisingly, Fridays and Mondays have identical peak engagement hours. Above-average engagement starts at 9 a.m. and ends around 3 p.m. However, the best times to post on X on Fridays are 10 a.m. to noon.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Saturdays
Generally speaking, we’ve noticed that Saturdays and Sundays have less engagement during the week's reset across most social platforms. Even with X, you’ll still see light to average engagement on the app. With that in mind, the best time to post on X on Saturdays is 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., about the rest of the day.
The Prime Posting Window for Tweets on Sundays
Similar to Saturdays, we’ve noticed less engagement on Sundays across most, if not all, social platforms. With the day itself, the best time to post on X on Sundays is between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. for average engagement.
Factors For Deciding The Best Time To Post On Twitter
1. Who is Your Target Audience?
Your first step is to define your target audience and understand their Twitter habits. For example, if you want to reach college students, research shows they are most active on Twitter in the evenings and on weekends.
2. Time Zones Matter
Next, consider time zones. Your time zone and the time zone of your target audience can impact your best posting time. For instance, if you’re based in New York but your target audience is in California, you’ll want to adjust your posting schedule to align with their Twitter habits.
3. What Industry Are You In?
Your industry can also impact the best time to post on Twitter. For example, if you’re in the tech industry, your audience is most active on Twitter during business hours.
4. What Type of Content Are You Sharing?
Finally, the type of content you’re sharing can impact your best posting time. For example, if you share news updates, you should post during the day when people are most likely to check Twitter for the latest headlines.
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Why Timing Matters When Posting On Twitter
The Audience Connection: Engaging Your Followers When They’re Online
Timing matters on Twitter because your followers are more likely to see and interact with your tweets when they’re online. Posting at peak times when your target audience is active increases the chances that your content will appear in their feed when they’re active.
Visibility Matters: Get Seen Before You’re Buried
Twitter’s fast-moving feed means tweets have a short lifespan. Posting when your target audience is active ensures your content stays visible longer before getting buried by newer posts.
Higher Engagement Rates
Tweets posted at the correct times tend to receive more likes, retweets, and replies, boosting engagement. This, in turn, can improve your content’s performance in Twitter’s algorithm, leading to more organic reach.
Optimize for Different Time Zones
If your audience spans multiple regions, posting at the right time ensures you reach most of your global followers.
Join the Trending Conversations
Posting when relevant conversations or trends are happening can allow you to engage with trending topics and gain more exposure.
When it comes to Twitter, consistency is critical. Buffer’s social media experts note that consistency on Twitter is essential for the algorithm to recognize your account as active and relevant. They recommend creating a consistent cadence of tweets to keep your audience engaged, noting that this can lead to better long-term relationships with followers. In a nutshell, by posting often. Or at least more often than you would post on other social media platforms.
Consider three tweets a day as a minimum, with 15 providing more audience opportunities. While some brands may tweet up to 100 times a day, for most, 30 per day is still a high number, and beyond that, you risk turning followers off. Those tweets don’t all have to be your original content. Always keep in mind that retweeting relevant material from other users is a way to provide your followers with more helpful content while also showing respect to those Twitter accounts that you value. You should share links to useful, interesting, or entertaining articles and videos (as long as they fit your brand messaging and target audience) to keep your handle in front of your followers without relying strictly on owned content.
Neil Patel emphasizes that consistency on Twitter is crucial for staying top-of-mind with your audience. He advises posting multiple times daily to maintain visibility, stating, "the more frequently you post, the more engagement you’re likely to get." However, he stresses that consistency in timing and quality is critical, and content should always be relevant and valuable to your audience.
Other Best Practices for Going Viral On Twitter
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Craft Relatable Tweets that Resonate with Your Target Audience
Your tweet has to connect with people. Nobody can engage with your Twitter post if it doesn't strike a chord. So, your tweets should always be about something your target audience may have experienced (personal stories), care about, agree with, or find humorous.
Practical Approach: Use Social Listening
Follow your target audience's pain points, gain insights from their daily lives, and understand what they like or dislike. Tools like Tweet Hunter can be invaluable here, providing insights that allow you to write tweets that echo the sentiments of your target audience.
Benefits
The contents of your tweet will mirror your target audience's reality and/or viewpoints, increasing the likelihood that they will engage with your tweet, be it a like, reply, or retweet.
Target the Right Audience
It’s not everyone. You want your tweets to hit home with the right Twitter users, so you’d better know what those people like. Brittany Berger wrote all about the benefits of social listening. She says it lets you:
Find out what your customers think
Re-evaluate your brand’s strengths and weaknesses
Supplement complex data from Twitter Analytics with genuine opinions
Get customers’ views of your competitors
Find new campaign ideas
Target specific keywords and hashtags that suit your ideal buyer.
See what those Twitter users are discussing and update your content strategy accordingly. This approach works for other social media platforms, too. Great marketers can even use monitoring to generate leads.
Timing is Everything
Timing can dramatically impact a tweet's success. The best time to post is when your audience is most active, as this is when you are most likely to take advantage of the engagement snowball effect.
Practical Approach: Analyze Engagement Patterns
Using Twitter's analytics and other third-party platforms, look for patterns in engagement and tailor your posting schedule to time your tweets accordingly. A tweet shared at the right time can catch the wave of peak user activity, making it more likely to go viral.
Benefits
Optimal timing gets your tweets maximum visibility in your followers' Twitter feeds. This increases the chance of mass engagement, making your tweets stand out and more likely to achieve viral success. Once others identify notable engagement, they are more likely to be intrigued by the tweet's contents, creating a snowball effect.
Talk with Your Followers, Not at Them
Buffer’s Kevan Lee says you need to know the difference between “voice” and “tone“. Think of voice as your brand’s personality – a core part of its identity – and tone as your brand’s mood from day to day. They explain it: “Voice is a mission statement. Tone is the application of that mission.”
The voice doesn’t change – this is how you always want your brand to be represented. But the tone changes with context. You also can’t always be selling. Twitter is a giant chat room. The Twitter community is there for online discussions, jokes, or education. And you can’t spend all your time talking about yourself.
Here are some suggestions to help you balance promotion with other content
The 80/20 rule states that 20% of your content can be promotional, but 80% should be attractive, about trending topics, and engaging to your audience.
The 5-3-2 ratio includes five relevant pieces from others, three non-promotional from you, and two promotional posts.
The 4-1-1 rule: Four pieces from others – plus one retweet – for every promotional tweet I send. Focus on offering value to your Twitter followers – that's what matters. Choose a ratio that makes sense to you, and try to keep to it.
Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags make tweets discoverable. Therefore, using them wisely will allow you to target your desired audience, as many will be looking for/interacting with content around the hashtag you choose.
Practical Approach: Research Hashtags
Take some time to research trending and niche-specific hashtags. To find valuable hashtag opportunities, you can use third-party hashtag analytics tools like Hashtagify. Once you've identified valuable hashtags, you can build exciting posts around them, naturally including these hashtags within your tweet.
Benefits
Relevant hashtags can catapult your tweets into more extensive discussions, expanding their reach beyond your immediate following. This strategy can help your tweets go viral by tapping into larger, more diverse audiences.
Know When to Tweet
Twitter is time-sensitive. Even with Twitter’s new algorithm, only the beginning of the user’s stream is affected. And it’s optional. That means you still rely mainly on timing to see your content.
It may feel like the whole world is constantly online, but some times of the day are busier than others. Think about television ads. Primetime spots are the most expensive but are only suitable for some products. Toy brands prefer after-school slots when their target audience is watching. Likewise, you’ll make the most significant impact on Twitter when your target audience is engaged.
Collaborate with Influencers
Influencer collaborations can be a game-changer in amplifying your tweet's reach. Leverage their communities to strategically place yourself (or your brand) before their vast following.
Practical Approach: Find Relevant Influencers
Find influencers whose followers align with your target audience and explore collaborations to create a promotional/educational campaign. Since this strategy requires a coordinated effort, you might have to invest more time and effort, and even a lot of money in some cases. However, if you find the right influencer, and their following is large, a tweet posted (or shared) by them can rapidly gain traction, prompt Twitter users to react, and increase your brand's visibility.
Benefits
Not only does the influencer introduce your tweet to a new and larger audience, but you also earn their seal of approval, which can significantly increase your chances of going viral on Twitter. The credibility you gain is also worth its weight in gold, as there is a lot of distrust on social media platforms. Having a stamp of approval from a well-known and respected influencer can undoubtedly contribute to your chances of going viral while boosting loyalty.
Add Calls-to-Action
You want engaged Twitter followers. Every retweet is an opportunity to reach a whole new audience. But people don’t engage with a piece of content just because they feel like it. Tell them what you need from them.
Practical Approach: Use Effective CTAs
Dan Zarella analyzed over 2.7 million tweets to see which CTAs led to the most retweets. Help, “retweet,” “please,” “how-to,” and “follow” are among the most retweeted words. If you want to see engaged Twitter followers, you’d better use ‘em. Twitter potential user Madalyn Sklar uses CTAs extensively to boost her posts.
Follow Trending Topics
Following trending topics on Twitter is not only to have but essential for going viral. Creating content based on trends with 'big potential' can make your tweets go viral.
Practical Approach: Identify Trends Early
Trends, by definition, are general directions in which something is developing or changing. Therefore, it is essential to identify trends early on rather than jumping on a trend bandwagon. First movers will always have the highest chance of capturing most people's attention. To help you, consider using Twitter's trends tools or third-party software like Trends24.
Benefits
An array of different benefits can be obtained by following trending topics. However, the main advantage is you have the opportunity to get in early on a trend that has enormous potential, which in turn means your tweet has the potential to swallow up most of the attention that your target trend will generate.
Realize Less Isn’t More
Twitter is a “microblogging” site, so it would make sense that Twitter content should be shorter than posts on other social networks. Not exactly. Buffer and SumAll teamed up to make this monster infographic showing the optimal length for posts on various social networks.
For instance, Facebook posts with around 40 characters see the highest engagement. For LinkedIn, you’re aiming for 25 words. Even though Twitter places a premium on characters, the sweet spot for Twitter copy is between 70 and 100 characters.
Encourage User Participation (Get Likes, Retweets & Replies)
Although many marketers know this already, 'engagement breeds engagement,' once you know this, you will never shy away from this again. Therefore, ask for retweets, likes, and replies, and don't feel bad about it, as not only is this a perfectly normal tactic, but the benefits are significant.
Practical Approach: Write Engaging Tweets
Write tweets that invite interaction in the form of a like, reply, and RT (retweet). This strategy is potent (due to the sharing potential) and straightforward. However, people often need to be motivated if you want them to do something, so consider making this more gamified by launching engagement initiatives such as giveaways and contests.
Benefits
Encouraging user participation can be akin to creating a powerful marketing army, as the contributions of followers (and non-followers) can make your tweet gain far more traction than it could on its own.
Use Visuals to Boost Engagement
Buffer found that visual content triples the rate of retweets and nearly doubles the likes rate. And because images take up Twitter real estate, your message becomes more prominent with a picture. But what if you don’t have good, original photos to share? Create “quote pictures.” One Twitter study found that pictures lead to 35% more retweets and that quotes increase retweets by 19%. I’m no math magician, but 35% + 19% = billions! Or maybe Twitter's growth doesn’t work like that. The point is to combine quotes and visual content for maximum impact.
Analyze Twitter Analytics
Remember the 'Know Your Audience' strategy from above? Well, this strategy is an extension of it. Analyzing Twitter analytics will allow you to identify what motivates your target audience, which is invaluable for crafting tweets that resonate with them and go viral.
Practical Approach: Review Tweet Performance
Use Twitter analytics to review your tweet performance metrics regularly. This includes checking the impressions, likes, comments, RTs, and link clicks. According to the data, you can use these insights to refine your content strategy and focus on tweets that generate the most engagement.
Benefits
The main benefit is that your tweet strategy can be much more data-driven, giving you a better chance of finding a winning recipe. In addition, you will save a great deal of time and resources by using a data-driven approach, as trial and error is much more time-consuming and less accurate.
Be Personal
When appropriate, name the person tweeting. It gives a more personal feel to your tweets. Harvard Business Review says that “empathy” is the crucial indicator of whether a company “gets” Twitter. They say empathy consists of “reassurance, authenticity, and emotional connection.” The best brands on Twitter don’t sound like brands. They sound like people. (Even when using promoted tweets using Twitter ads) Your tweets don’t need to save the rainforest (although they are excellent party tricks if you know how); you just want to seem human.
Embrace Memes
Everyone loves a good laugh regardless of your industry, so why not use humor to your advantage? Nothing gets people laughing more than a good meme, so if you can link it to your brand somehow, this can be an incredibly effective way of generating mass attention for your tweet.
Practical Approach: Stay Current with Memes
Just like Twitter trends, you must stay abreast of the latest memes. One effective strategy is to find popular memes that have gone viral in the past. This is so you can see if they are doing something I can replicate but in a way that I put my spin on it. If a particular photo or catchphrase has done well with other accounts, I can tweak these to reflect my brand or message.
Benefits
Memes can make your tweets entertaining, relatable, and memorable. And here is the benefit - if the contents of a meme evoke laughter or resonate strongly with people, people are much more likely to share it on their Twitter profile, which can increase the chances of it going viral.
Go Viral Today with Our Viral on Demand Platform
Megaphone is a viral on-demand platform designed to boost your online presence authentically and organically. Their software connects you with influential creators in your niche, helping you grow impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include a sophisticated engagement network, a private engagement pod service (coming soon), and diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X-spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).
Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Their complex matching algorithm ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with this viral on-demand platform.