What, When & How Often To Tweet For Business (infographic)

As you develop a social media strategy to complement the rest of your content marketing efforts, remember that each channel has its own rhythm and rhyme.

Even though everything you post needs to reflect back your brand image, what you do on Twitter may look a bit different from what you do on LinkedIn< https://www.jonespr.net/inboundaccelerator/social-media-linkedin-daily>.

While LinkedIn maintains an air of professionalism, even for more avant garde brands, Twitter is a space in which you can experiment a bit more with personality. Within reason, of course. So what should you post to Twitter? How often?

Initially notable for its forced brevity, Twitter may have expanded its original 144-character limit to 280, but shorter is still better and you shouldn’t clutter a tweet with too many @mentions or hashtags. To catch attention and encourage engagement, limits tweets to between 71 and 100 characters. Less is still more.

Visual content tends to be most effective in generating engagement. According to Twitter itself, people are three times more likely to engage with tweets that contain videos or photos, and you can include up to four photos in a single tweet.

Whether you are creating new tweets or retweeting positive customer feedback or other relevant content from other Twitter users, ask yourself if you are providing something that will advance an idea, entertain or educate your audience. Everything you publish should do at least one of those three things in order to inspire conversations.

Twitter pioneered the hashtag, but it isn’t the place to get carried away, especially as a business. Be conservative and precise in your use of hashtags to avoid coming across as spammy. Stick with one or two carefully chosen hashtags based on what hashtags your audience is already using when talking about your brand.

Twitter’s fast-paced environment means a single tweet doesn’t stay in user’s feeds for long, and the algorithm favors up to the minute material. Tweet often — 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 going beyond 30 per day puts you at risk of turning followers off.

Twitter itself doesn’t recommend any specific posting schedule for its business pages, but it does recommend creating a “regular cadence” of content so your followers know what to expect from your page.

According to HubSpot, many businesses pick up a schedule of tweeting first thing in the morning, at lunch break, and again in the early evening to match the schedules of their audience’s social media use.

However, the highest overall click rates on Twitter occur weekdays between 1 and 3 p.m., with the worst times appearing to be weekend evenings after 8 p.m. and Fridays after 3 p.m. B2B pages sometimes benefit from early evening tweets, as this is when entrepreneurs may be catching up on the latest news.

Certain industries may see more traffic at different times — such as a restaurant or bar posting about a Happy Hour special late in the afternoon on a weekday. Hobby and recreational brands tend to do better on weekends when audiences are thinking about their free time activities.

Experiment with different times and days and monitor your results to adapt your own posting schedule that meets the needs of your brand and your audience.

Need details on other social media platforms? Check out our master blog post here: Your Complete Social Media Guide: What, Where, When & How Often To Post. It covers best practices for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and more.

I’d also be glad to chat with you about how to include social media in your larger content marketing strategy. Schedule a no-obligation consultation here.