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?
Wow, fascinating analysis! Thanks for including me.
You’re most welcome, David. Thank you for tweeting about this post.
Thank you Geno for your advice! Much appreciated!!!!
and… David Thanks for your Info.. as I would not have seen this! PS.. I read and use your book all the time.
My pleasure, Marie. Glad you’ve found my advice of help.
How did you determine tweets / day?
Is that tweets that everyone will see, or does it include @ replies?
I had 1 share today, 1 RT, and 4 @replies… so I think I’m at 2, but depending on how you count, that could be seen as 6. If you don’t follow the people I @reply to, you won’t see those other 4.
Eric, I used HowOftenDoYouTweet.com (cross-checking their data with this tool too) which measures the average over the lifetime of the Twitter account. Yours is 4.2 today.
This is useful information Geno – thanks for pulling it together.
On the pull side, I enjoy streams from the likes of @Mashable and @SocialBulletin but find the flow exhausting. I’ve unfollowed Mashable; it was just too much. I tend to follow people-brands like @dmscott and @gerrymcgovern who offer content of value and don’t over-tweet.
On the push side, no more than 3 (re)tweets a day seems to be my sweet spot. (1) I’m just not that important; (2) I try to share stuff that is useful to my followers or gives them a glimpse into my work in digital / social media.
There, that’s my two bitcoins on the subject.
Great “two bitcoins”, Guy! Thank you for taking the time to comment.
Geno,
It is actually funny that you tweeted this post today. I was just thinking about how I often find myself unable to find the optimum tweeting capacity for me. Sometimes I can go a few days without tweeting much and then I start to pick up. For example the past couple of days I have been tweeting up a storm because well.. I have a lot to talk about… but I am also noticing a drop in followers. (This goes the same for FB) I guess people are not very interested in what I have to say. Have to work on the quality of the content I’m producing or reproducing.