It is difficult to find reliable information when it comes to Twitter usage in Japan. Since there was not any public source available that can answer my question, I turned to the online searching tools.
My findings were quite similar to the US numbers released by HubSpot in 2009 except a few details. Here’s the take away:
IN JAPAN
–If you want to be re-tweeted immediately, the best time to tweet is Thursday night around 10 PM.
-Your tweets have the highest chance of being retweeted if they are sent on Tuesday around 10 PM (followed by 2 busy days)
-You might not want to send out tweets on Saturday, that is when the tweeting activity is almost 30% lower than any other day.
-The highest numbers of tweets are sent on Tuesday and Thursday. Saturday and Sunday are the slowest days.
Additionally, on an average day the number of tweets sent
-decreases dramatically after 1 am,
-starts to pick up around 6 am,
-shows a steep increase around 12:30 during the lunch time
– peaks around 10 PM.
Our data presents a somewhat different picture than the US data and it is because there are 4 different time zones in the US (with different population density). For instance, when people in LA tweet about a popular drama they have just watched on TV , folks in the East Coast would be sleeping.
In both Japanese and the US data, Thursdays are the busiest days. In our data, we observed the same level of tweeting activity on Tuesday and Thursday, we gave the highest ranking to Thursday because a somewhat low level of tweeting activity occurred on the Thursday morning which was used in this data.
Methodology: We identified the most common Japanese words in Japanese language: の、を、に(Source: NISPET). Then we searched on Google Realtime to check for the hits for each keyword. Since all results were similar we only used the results for “の.” Unfortunately, Google Realtime only displays a series of bars where the highest bar represents the highest amount of tweets sent in the data set. We assigned a number to each bar according to its length and then we added up the numbers for each day and for each hour. Finally the numbers were normalized, 100 being the top score. February 21-27 data was used for weekly analysis and Februrary 21st data was used for the daily analysis.
These results however should be interpreted with caution because
–calculating a value for “bar length” is not an ideal method
– seasonal influences: e.g., Valentines Day, New Years, Golden Week
– daily influences:e.g., unexpected political developments, disasters, an intriguing celebrity tweet
-the number of tweeters (has always been going up, not steady)
-Twitter or the APP users might experience temporary problems etc.
