49 Noteworthy Social Networking Stats and Facts

Though new social networks continue to be launched (e.g. SnapChat, Blab) and some disappear (anyone remember Pownce or Friendster?), the “big three” among both consumers and marketers continue to thrive and dominate.

But there are no guarantees that leadership will last, and the social networking landscape is constantly evolving. As noted below, Instagram is taking off (nearly a third of U.S. marketers used the site in 2015, and that figure is expected to approach 70% by 2017) while Google+ is struggling (though it has 300 million active monthly users worldwide, less than 6 million made any public posts in 2015).

Image credit: Social Media Examiner

Here are three more key takeaways from the more than four dozen social networking facts and statistics below:

Facebook is the most popular social network on the planet—except with CEOs. An incredible 71% of all Internet users are on Facebook, including more than half of all online adults aged 65 and older. In addition, 96% of all B2C and 88% of B2B companies use Facebook for marketing. Yet within the 50 largest global companies, not one CEO is active on Facebook.

Small business loves Facebook, though most don’t know if it “works.” 93% of small business owners and marketers use Facebook, and 92% agree that social media is important for their businesses. Yet most say “they don’t know whether their Facebook outreach is ‘working.’” And just one in three “characterize Facebook efforts as ‘effective.’”

LinkedIn is tops for B2B marketing, but…not for advertising? 41% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the most important social network they use, and 81% say they use it to help launch new products. That’s likely because 74% B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to help make purchasing decisions. Yet just 18% of B2B SMB marketers are using LinkedIn ads (while 75% run ads on Facebook).

Learn more about those findings and many others in these 49 noteworthy social networking facts and stats.

18 Facebook Stats and Facts

1. More than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents nearly a third (31%) of all seniors. (Pew Research)

2. 71% of all Internet users are on Facebook. (Pew Research)

3. There are 968 million active daily users on Facebook. Users spend, on average, 20 minutes per day on the site. (Infinit Datum)

4. 91% of millennials (aged 15-34) are on Facebook. (Infinit Datum)

5. 70% of Facebook users engage with the site daily—and 45% do so several times a day. (Pew Research)

6. Just 28% of Internet users say they use only one social networking site. But of those users, 79% are on Facebook. (Pew Research)

7. Facebook’s mobile user base increased by 15% in 2014 and the number of mobile-only users increased by 34%. What used to be a secondary means of using social media is now the first choice. (Twelveskip)

8. The average Facebook user has 200 Facebook friends. A quarter of those, on average, are also real-life friends. And almost 50% of Facebook users are friends with their own parents. (Cloudswave)

9. 93% of small business owners/marketers use Facebook, ahead of Twitter at 79%. (Social Media Examiner)

10. But despite the fact that 92% of small businesses agree that social media is important for their business AND that the majority use Facebook for their social media marketing, most also report that they don’t know whether their Facebook outreach is “working.” (Social Media Examiner)

11. 96% of B2C and and 88% of B2B companies use Facebook for marketing. (Statistica)

12. Most B2C marketers (56%) say Facebook has generated some revenue for their business. (MarketingProfs)

13. 84.7% of US companies with 100 employees or more used Facebook for marketing activities in 2015. That share is projected to rise to 85.3% in 2016, and 85.8% in 2017. (MediaPost)

14. Among the 50 largest global companies, none of their CEOs are active on Facebook. (MarketWatch)

15. Globally, 30% of people have liked a brand’s Facebook page. (Link Humans)

16. The “like” button is clicked three million times every minute on LinkedIn. (Link Humans)

17. Or maybe that’s four million; every minute, Facebook users “like” almost 4.2 million posts per another source. (DR4WARD)

18. 21% of consumers say they unfollow brands that post repetitive or boring content. 19% say they would unfollow a brand on Facebook if the brand posted too often—more than six times a day. (SocialTimes)

9 LinkedIn Stats and Facts

19. LinkedIn is the largest professional network, with more than 380 million members in 200 countries. The heaviest users are aged 30-64. (Infini Datum)

20. LinkedIn reaches 200 different countries and territories. (Link Humans)

21. 57% of LinkedIn users are male. (Link Humans)

22. Though Facebook is the most important social network to marketers overall, LinkedIn is tops with B2B marketers—41% say it’s the most important network they use. (V3 Broadsuite Blog)

23. 81% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to help launch new products. (Infini Datum)

24. 74% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to help make purchasing decisions. (Marketing Think)

25. Just 18% of B2B SMB marketers are using LinkedIn ads. These same marketers are using Facebook ads at a rate of 75%. (Social Media Examiner)

26. 73% of Fortune 500 CEOs with only one social network listed LinkedIn as their preferred choice. (MarketWatch)

27. How to increase interaction with LinkedIn page posts? There’s a 45% average in increase in engagement when a LinkedIn post contains a link, a 50% increase in comments when a post contains a question, and a 98% increase in comments when the post contains an image. (DMR)

7 Twitter Stats and Facts

28. 36% of Twitter users visit the site daily. (Pew Research)

29. Twitter has 302 million active users per month. (Link Humans)

30. Every minute, Twitter users post more than 347,000 tweets. (DR4WARD)

31. 23% of adult Internet users are on Twitter, and there are 288 million active users monthly. (Infini Datum)

32. 25% of Twitter advertising budgets are dedicated to mobile, and 89% of Twitter’s 1Q15 revenue came from mobile. (Infini Datum)

33. 88% of B2B marketers in North America use Twitter for content distribution. (DMR)

34. 46% of Twitter users follow news organizations, reporters or commentators. (Infini Datum)

5 Pinterest Stats and Facts

35. Pinterest has 47 million active monthly users worldwide. (Infini Datum)

36. Women (still) dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men. (Pew Research)

37. 80% of Pinterest users are women, and they account for 92% of all pins. (Link Humans)

38. Every minute, Pinterest users pin more than 9,700. (DR4WARD)

39. The most popular topic on Pinterest is food, which accounts for 57% of all pins. (DMR)

7 Instagram Stats and Facts

40. There are more than 400 million active monthly users on Instagram. 75% of users live outside the U.S.. (Infini Datum)

41. 30% of all U.S. social media users are on Instagram. 90% of Instagram users are under age 35, and about a third of all U.S. teens consider Instagram to be their favorite social network. (DMR)

42. Roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily. (Pew Research)

43. Every minute, Instagram users “like” more than 1.7 million photos. (DR4WARD)

44. There are 3.5 billion “likes” on Instagram daily. (Infini Datum)

45. 32% of U.S. companies with 100 employees or more used Instagram for marketing activities in 2015. eMarketer predicts that number will jump to nearly 49% in 2016, and, by 2017, increase to 70.7% of U.S. companies. (MediaPost)

46. B2C marketers are significantly more likely (49%) than B2B marketers (32%) to say they plan to increase activities on Instagram in 2016. (Infini Datum)

3 Google+ Stats and Facts

47. Google+ has 300 million active monthly users worldwide; but less than 6 million made any public posts in 2015. (Infini Datum)

48. 64% of North American B2B marketers use Google+ to distribute content, but just 17% use it for new product launches (vs. 81% who use LinkedIn). (Infini Datum)

49. Google+ is most used in Indonesia (83% of the online population), India (82% of the online population) and Vietnam (80% of internet users). (Digital Information World)

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Social Media Engagement Trends You Shouldn’t Miss [Infographic]

Many companies have clued-up the fact that being present and active on social media platforms is imperative if they are to succeed in their marketing efforts. Organizations have found it critical to use social tools to engage their customers, employees and other external stakeholders. Through social tools, they are able to listen, gather actionable intelligence and measure outcomes and progress.

So social media engagement is as important to organization as their products and services. As a matter of fact, it can be said that social media is the best thing that ever happened to online businesses. According to statistics, 88.2% of U.S companies use social media and the figure is expected to grow to 89% by 2017.

70% of internet users are active social media users

The rise of social technologies and mobile phones has given customers more power than ever. Now, customers are more informed, dynamic and alert to what is happening around them. 7 in 10 internet users are active social media users; hence, they can access information regarding various company offers, news and trends. Their ability to find information in a matter of seconds puts them in firm control of their own destiny. Consequently, this trend is forcing marketers to rethink the way they connect and engage with their customers. About 40% of internet users use social media apps. This means that marketers face the daunting task of providing real-time, tailor-made experiences that make customer experience a blissful event. Whether it be a mobile app that provides online customer care services or a push notification that promotes a sale, marketers must now appreciate the full impact of social mobile apps. This is a grand opportunity for organizations to engage with their customers like never before.

Facebook remains the most active social media platform, while the rest aren’t left behind

Facebook continues to be the most active social media site. According to pew Research findings, more than 71% of internet users are on Facebook. You can’t ignore Facebook as a major tool for social engagement because it is the ultimate beta business. Nearly 50% of Facebook users use it on a daily basis while 25% use it on weekly basis. YouTube (28%), Google + (25%), Twitter (27%) and Instagram (24%) are all social networks that record significant interactions by its users on a daily basis.

Because post engagement on Facebook is about 75% in the first 5 hours, it means that regular updates is important in order to maintain customer engagement. It is also important to note that Thursdays and Fridays record 18% more post engagements. 64% of marketers say increasing customer engagement is an essential thing in their social media marketing strategy. Therefore, regular updates with particular emphasis on Thursdays and Fridays is a sure way to increase your social media engagement.

Instagram has better brand engagement than any other social media platform

According to a recently released study by Forrester, for every one million brand followers on Facebook, there were only 700 interactions (sharing, liking and commenting) and 300 interactionsfor every 1 million followers in the case of twitter.

By all means, these are very dismal rates. However, Instagram presents an exception. For every1 million followers on Instagram, there were 42,000 brand engagement. This is about 58 and 120 times more brand engagement in Instagram than on Facebook and twitter respectively.

This tells us that Instagram is a more effective social tool for brand engagement than Facebook and twitter combined. If you have been overlooking Instagram thinking it isn’t valuable tool for branding, then you might have to think again. Ignore Instagram at your own peril.

Type of social content that result in more engagement

Perhaps another interesting fact about social media engagement is that some rules are quite different from what happens with website and blog content. In social media, engagement is at its peak where the amount of text is kept at its absolute minimum.

Facebook posts with less than 250 characters receive 60% more engagement. 87% of Facebook post engagement happens on posts with images while twits with images receive 150% more retweets. It is even better to post more than one images in Facebook to achieve 12.9 time more engagement. Another interesting take away is that tweeting more than 3 times a day will decrease your brand engagement by more than 300%. Tweeting with 3 or more hashtags will also hurt your engagement by 17%.

Final thoughts

Having said that, it is important to ensure that your social media profiles are complete and optimized to attract and engage your audience the way you want. Adding relevant keywords in your social media updates and profiles is often the first step towards social media engagement success.

Irrespective of the social media platform you are using, integrating visual media is important because it increases engagement. Text-laden and formulaic posts are boring and devoid of human touch. Once you understand the potential of visual social media, you will begin to see dramatic improvement in the way people engage with your brand.

Another critical point of consideration for marketers is not to view social media as simply a platform to amplify their products and services; instead, social media should be used to provide more value to their customers. It should be used to discover new customer trends, new technologies and better ways of relating with customers before the competitors do.

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Social Media Analytics For Dummies: A Tutorial

Social media monitoring is one of the keys to your success online.

Without examining social media analytics and assessing the performance of your posts and social profiles, you are just playing a guessing game.

By guessing, you’re missing out on a serious understanding for your business—what content is and is not working.

Social data and metrics help you track your brand’s impact and reach online. It also helps you better engage your customers, build relationships, optimize your social media strategy and monitor your performance.

Importance Of Social Media Analytics

If you are using social media for business, you simply can’t ignore social media analytical data. Social media monitoring helps to develop a deeper understanding of how people are interacting with your brand, how they access and use your website, and what they are saying about you in the online community.

Analytics help you learn more about your customers. The more information you can collect about them, the better position you will be in to anticipate and serve their needs – whether it’s providing them with information they are seeking, answering a question, providing product and service options or helping them accomplish a task online.

The benefits of social analytics include:

• More targeted posts and content
• Saving money on advertising and marketing
• A more optimized content marketing strategy
• The ability to provide better customer service
• The ability to see the ROI for your investment in social media

3 Key Social Media Monitoring Tasks

Overall, social media monitoring helps you accomplish 3 key tasks:

1. Diagnose: Assess what is working and adjust your communication strategies and timing to improve results.
2. Prioritize: Determine which content, social platforms, users, and other factors get priority. Use the social data to plan your strategies.
3. Evaluate: Use the analytics data to determine the success of your strategy and overall value to your marketing strategy.

Now that you understand the importance of social analytics, let’s explore the different types of social media metrics you can measure.

Types Of Social Media Monitoring Metrics

One of the most important things to understand about social media analytics is that you can measure virtually anything, and many companies get caught up analyzing dozens and dozens of social media metrics. If you are just starting out, one of the best social media analytics tips to follow is that you can learn a lot by simply tracking the most important and popular metrics:

• Conversions: Arguably the most important metric is conversions. From a social media perspective, a conversion is getting a user to take a desired action on your social media profiles. For example, on Facebook or LinkedIn, it could be commenting on a post; on Twitter, it could be a reply or retweet. Conversions are defined by you and can also include filling out an online form, signing up for your website, clicking through from social media to your website, or any other goal that helps you achieve your marketing objectives.
• Reach: This is the size of the audience with which you are able to communicate. It can be defined on a per-post or overall reach basis.
• Engagement: The total number of interactions (likes, shares, comments, +1s, retweets) on a post.
• Impressions: This is how many people saw your post in their social media feeds.
• Audience growth rate: The rate with which your social audience has grown in comparison to last week, month or year.
• Visits vs unique visits: A comparison of the total number of visits and number of unique visitors who have not visited your site before.
• Bounce rate: The number of people who land on your website and immediately leave your site.
• Referral traffic: The amount of website traffic that is being driven from your social media accounts.
• Influence scores: These scores provide you with a social rating of sorts based on your social media network and activity. Klout is perhaps the best known platform.

Naturally, some marketers prefer some metrics over others and believe some offer more value and insight. Some prefer clicks over retweets on Twitter, shares over likes, daily traffic over traffic on a per-post basis.

The important thing to keep in mind is to choose the metrics that provide you with the social data and information you need to make important business and marketing decisions.

Social Media Analytics Tools

There are two main ways you can approach social media monitoring: Using social media dashboards on the platforms themselves, or using third party social media analytics tools to track your campaigns.

Social Network Analytics Dashboards

All of the top social networks now have a built-in analytics dashboard for you to track your posts and campaigns:

Facebook Insights

This is available for all page admins. It provides you with stats for your posts, your page fans and reach.

How to access: Click the “insights” tab located on the top of your Facebook page.

Twitter Analytics

This provides you with a 28-day overview of your performance on Twitter. It provides data regarding clicks, mentions, favorites, retweets and impressions. You can export data and generate a variety of reports.

How to access: Go to analytics.twitter.com and log in with your Twitter login.

LinkedIn (personal and business accounts)

LinkedIn collects data about personal and business profiles. For personal accounts, it provides you with data about who has viewed your profile, the reach of your posts, and more. For business profiles, it provides you with a breakdown of posts, followers, and network growth, including clicks, interactions, and engagement.

To access personal page data: Go to profile and click on “who’s viewed your profile” in the dropdown menu.

To access business page data: Go to your business page and click on “analytics.”

Pinterest Analytics

The Pinterest dashboard provides insights into followers, impressions, audience stats and engagement. You can view detailed reports to gain a better understanding of which boards and posts perform best. Analytics are available for personal and business pages.

How to access: Go to analytics.pinterest.com and login with your Pinterest login.

Google+ Insights

Google+ provides insights about your audience, engagement, and visibility for your personal and business pages.

How to access: From your Google+ page, click the “Manage Page” button and scroll down to the insights section.

Third Party Social Analytics Tools

There is no shortage of high quality social media analytics tools available. Some are available for free with options to upgrade, and some are available for a monthly subscription fee.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is not only for your website. You can also use it to measure social analytics for your website through social reports. The reports help you assess referral traffic from social networks, review content that is best to share, assess how visits from specific social platforms behave on your website and more.

Website: www.google.ca/analytics/

Buffer

Buffer offers both a free and a paid plan. With its free plan, you can track engagement stats for your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. You can also write and schedule posts, and you can use its link shortener to track the links’ performance.

Website: https://buffer.com/

Moz Analytics

A popular SEO tool, Moz Pro also provides you with built-in social media analytics to track your social media marketing efforts. You can breakdown traffic by social network and engagement. It supports Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It is a fee-based subscription.

Website: http://moz.com/

SproutSocial

SproutSocial provides you with the best of both worlds – a social media management platform and analytics in one. It allows you to publish posts, track them, and view key data to help you better optimize your social campaigns. Analytics reports can be custom branded and exported.

Website: http://sproutsocial.com/

Social Analytics

Social Analytics allows you to map your social reach and provides you with in-depth social data about your users, social reach and marketing efforts. You can import data from all major social networks you use.

Website: http://www.loginradius.com/social-analytics

Other Social Tools Worth Trying

• Klout
• Followerwonk (for Twitter)
• SumAll
• Quintly
• Cyfe
• TweetReach
• Tailwind (for Pinterest)

4 Social Media Analytics Tips For Newbies

Here are some social media analytics tips to help you in your quest to master social analytics and become a social media star:

1. You don’t have to measure everything: Measure what matters and what will help you achieve your business goals. Don’t get caught in analysis paralysis.
2. Understand what you’re measuring: Numbers are meaningless if you don’t know why they’re relevant and how they can help you achieve your business or personal social media goals.
3. Choose a select few social analytics tools that work for you: You don’t need to use all of them. Try out a few tools and use the ones that make the most sense for your business or personal needs.
4. Look at social analytics from a holistic perspective: Avoid focusing solely on a single form of measurement. Think about things from a broad perspective and consider all the metrics you have access to.

What we’re trying to say is…
Social media monitoring should be approached with your business goals in mind. Use the above analytics tutorial and social media analytics tips as a starting point for integrating social analytics into your marketing and business strategy. Use social data to drive decisions about your brand’s online presence, how to better target and engage users, and how to improve your overall online marketing strategy.

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The Biggest Social Media Science Study: What 4.8 Million Tweets Say About the Best Time to Tweet

Imagine removing all guesswork when you schedule your tweets, knowing the times that work for maximum clicks and maximum engagement.

As someone who shares frequently to social media, this info would be fantastic to have! We’re always eager to dig up new research into social media best practices—things like length and frequency and timing.

The timing element, in particular, feels like one where we’d love to dig deeper. And we just so happen to have a host of data on this from the 2 million users who have signed up for Buffer!

With a big hand from our data team, we analyzed over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, pulling the stats on how clicks and engagement and timing occur throughout the day and in different time zones. We’d love to share with you what we found!

The best time to tweet: Our 4.8 million-tweet research study

Our key learnings

Wow, we learned so much looking at the awesome stats from those who use Buffer! Here were some of the takeaways we came up with. I’d love to hear what catches your eye, too!

• Early mornings are the best time to tweet in order to get clicks.
• Evenings and late at night are the best time, on average, for total engagement with your tweets
• In some cases, the most popular times to post are opposite of the best times to post.
• Popular times and best times to tweet differ across time zones.

The most popular time to tweet:

Noon to 1:00 p.m.

We’ve taken the data from all tweets sent through Buffer to find the most popular times for posting to Twitter. Looking at all tweets sent across all major time zones, here is an overview of the most popular times to tweet.

• Noon to 1:00 p.m. local time, on average for each time zone, is the most popular time to tweet
• The highest volume of tweets occurs between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., peaking between noon and 1:00 p.m.
• The fewest tweets are sent between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

Here’s the chart for the most popular times worldwide, taken from an average of 10 major time zones (the times represent local time).

Here is the graph for the most popular times to tweet in each of the four major U.S. time zones. 

(We normalized the data to account for daylight’s savings in the U.S. as well.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Europe and Africa.

(Note: The London (GMT) time zone used to be the default time zone for new Buffer users, so our data for GMT is not as clean as we would like it to be. We’ve omitted any takeaways for GMT from the research results here.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Asia and Australia.

It’s interesting to see how the most popular time to tweet varies across the time zones. We’ve shared Buffer’s 10 most popular time zones in the charts above. Here’s a list of each most popular hour for the 10 major time zones.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 9:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): noon
• Chicago (Central Time): noon
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): noon
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central European): 4:00 p.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 10:00 p.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 8:00 a.m.
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon

For any clarification on this or the other research throughout this article, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The most popular time to post could be due to a number of factors: This is when most people have access to Twitter (perhaps at a work computer), this is when online audiences are most likely to be connected (see Burrito Principle), etc.
• Should you post during the most popular times? That’s one possibility. Also, you may find success posting at non-peak times, when the volume of tweets is lower.
• If you have a large international audience on Twitter, you may wish to locate the particular part of the world where they’re from, and adjust your schedule accordingly. You can find the times when your audience may be online with tools like Followerwonk and Crowdfire.

The best times to tweet to get more clicks

We were excited to dig into the specific metrics for each of these tweets, too, in hopes of coming up with some recommendations and best practices to test out for your Twitter strategy.

First up, the best time to tweet for clicks.

Looking at the data, we found the following trends for maximizing your chance to get more clicks:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most clicks on average
• The highest number of clicks per tweet occurs between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The fewest clicks per tweet happen in the morning (when tweet volume is particularly high), between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m..

The data in the below chart is the worldwide average, calculated for the local time in each time zone. So the peak at the 2:00 a.m. hour would hold true as the overall top time no matter which time zone you’re in—2:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, New York, Cape Town, Hong Kong, etc.

For the specifics on each of the best time to tweet for clicks in each of the major time zones in Buffer, here’s a breakdown.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): 7:00 p.m.
• Chicago (Central Time): 2:00 a.m.
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): 11:00 p.m.
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, etc. (Central European): 2:00 a.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Istanbul, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 2:00 a.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 5:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 8:00 a.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• Clicks was far and away the largest engagement metric that we tracked in this study (compared to retweets, replies, and favorites).
• Some of the recommended best times for individual time zones show thatnon-peak hours are the top time to tweet for clicks. This data may reflect some particularly high-achieving posts—some outliers—that bring up the average when the volume of tweets is lowest. Still, it’d be a great one to test for your profile to see what results you get.
• One neat thing to keep in mind is that a non-peak hour in, say, Los Angeles may correspond to a peak hour in London or Paris. The worldwide audience is definitely one to consider when finding the best time to tweet.

The best times for overall engagement with your tweet

We define engagement as clicks plus retweets, favorites, and replies. When looking at all these interactions together, we found the following trends formaximizing your chance to get the most engagement on your tweets:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most total engagement on average
• The highest amount of engagement per tweet occurs between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The smallest amount of engagement happens during traditional work hours, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The best times to tweet for engagement are quite the inverse of the most popular times to tweet. (The late-night infomercial effect—tweet when fewer people are tweeting—seems to be the case here.)

The best times for retweets and favorites on your tweets

Adding together two of the most common engagement metrics, we found some interesting trends for maximizing the retweets and favorites on your tweets, especially for those with a U.S. audience.

Looking at 1.1 million tweets from U.S. Buffer users from January through March 2015, here were some of the notable takeaways we found:

• Tweets sent at the 9:00 p.m. hour in the U.S. earn the most retweets and favorites on average
• The highest number of retweets and favorites occurs between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., peaking between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• The lowest retweet-favorite engagement happens at 3:00 a.m.

(Interesting to note, the takeaways from this data compared to the worldwide engagement data differ slightly for a couple reasons: 1) clicks represent a huge portion of overall engagement, and 2) the worldwide vs. US datasets vary.)

We’d love to make it easy for you to share these results with your audience, your friends, your clients—anyone you think might benefit from them.

>> Download every chart from this post (.zip) <<

The methodology for our research

We studied all tweets ever sent through Buffer—4.8 million tweets since October 2010!

Based on this sample set, we looked at the number of clicks per tweet, favorites per tweet, retweets per tweet, and replies per tweet, in accordance with the time of day that the tweet was posted to Twitter.

Further, we segmented the results according to time zones, based on the assumption that the learnings might be more actionable if they could be specific to exactly where you live and work.

We had an interesting opportunity to consider whether median or average would be the better metric to use for our insights. It turns out that so many tweets in the dataset receive minimal engagement that the median was often zero. For this reason, we chose to display the average.

Over to you: What are your takeaways?

We’re so grateful for the chance to dig into the stats from the many tweets that people choose to share with Buffer. The data is super insightful, both for sharing with others and for impacting our own social media marketing plans!

What did you notice from the stats here?

Did any of the results surprise you or get you thinking about your plans in a different way?

I’d love to hear your take on this! Feel free to share any thoughts at all in the comments!

Image sources: IconFinder, Blurgrounds, Death to the Stock Photo, UnSplash

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