If you’re on Twitter, like me, you’ve probably wondered more than once: How many Tweets are too many? What pace do my (current, and prospective) Twitter followers want from me? Hourly? Daily? Where’s that sweet spot?
I myself have been trying both frequent Tweets, and seldom ones, manual, and scheduled… And you know what? I’ve always been noticing that, as in anything, quality always beats the quantity. It may sound obvious, but hear me out. There are slow days, and days when the amount of useful data and high quality content is so massive that the task of content curation — be it on Twitter or Diigo, Paper.li or Shareist, or any other platform in-between — really becomes challenging. Do pace yourself in moments like these! Schedule the speed at which you’re going to be serving the information! A flood is never good. Not even when it’s a flood of high quality content. In fact, in these cases it is even harder to digest, and frustrating to follow (because the “end-consumer” can get quickly upset that they just don’t have the time to eat it all up).
I’ve come to the above conclusion based on my own experience (e.g. Twitter following either slows down, or sometimes even drops, when I dump too much data on their heads). But then I thought: wouldn’t it be also interesting to analyze how frequently some of the top Internet marketing influencers tweet? After some time spent researching, I’d like to show you how things look (the below order is merely alphabetical):
- Matt Cutts (@MattCutts) — 8.8 Tweets a day
- Rhea Drysdale (@Rhea) — 7.7
- Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok) — 2.7
- Rand Fishkin (@RandFish) — 6.5
- Mitch Joel (@MitchJoel) — 4.7
- Avinash Kaushik (@Avinash) — 7.2
- Rebecca Lieb (@lieblink) — 2.2
- Wil Reynolds (@WilReynolds) — 7.5
- David Meerman Scott (@DMScott) — 4.5
- Jim Sterne (@JimSterne) — 2.4
- Brett Tabke (@BTabke) — 6.5
- Aaron Wall (@AaronWall) — 2.9
- Tamar Weinberg (@Tamar) — 3.5
- Jill Whalen (@JillWhalen) — 7.8
- Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella) — 7.4
Of course, there are also such Twitter users (and tremendous influencers) as @Mashable (with nearly 3,000,000 followers, and an average of 29.4 Tweets per day), Gary Vaynerchuk aka @GaryVee (who is nearing his 1,000,000 followers, posting 35.2 Tweets every day), @ChrisBrogan (48.8), Scott Stratten aka @Unmarketing (57.3), and others who tweet at least once every hour. Most of these either have teams of people responsible for tweeting, or are obsessed (in a good way, but yes, obsessed!) with social media. And frankly, as a user, I find it difficult to follow their streams of consciousness, news, or whatever else. But since they bleed social media, we all expect them to tweet that much… Exceptions aside, it seems that 8 Tweets a day (or less) is that sweet spot. I’m at 14.6. Seems like I need to pace myself too… You?