How many times a day should you tweet?
Is there a formula for success? We take a look.
How many times a day should you post on Twitter? Too often and your risk annoying people into unfollowing you, too infrequently and they’ll forget about you altogether. So is there a sweet spot somewhere in between?
Marketing and communications companies have devoted many hours of research trying to answer this question and the advice varies anywhere from two to 50 times a day. It largely depends on which school of thought they follow: some researchers have suggested that posting less leads to higher levels of engagement (retweets, shares etc) as there is one clear call to action, whereas others believe more posts equal more opportunities to get your message seen.
The lack of a consensus indicates that there is no one right way to approach this. Every Twitter account is a unique sum of its parts – the followers and following, the content shared, the community it’s part of – and what works for one will not necessarily work for another.
Deciding how often to post is also dependent on your overall objective: for example, are you trying to grow followers or increase engagement with your posts? The best way to find out what is effective for you is to experiment with frequency over a period of two-three months, set your own metrics for success and record the results. The very best data you can use is your own.
One thing is certain. The most effective tweets are ones in which you share interesting, topical insight that is relevant to your followers. If you have enough of this kind of content to populate ten tweets a day then there is no reason why you shouldn’t share it. But there is no point in tweeting just for the sake of it: it’ll be obvious in your tweet and instead it’ll look like you have nothing worthwhile to say.
That’s not to say that you should desert your feed for days at a time when you don’t have anything timely to share. Use this opportunity to retweet or comment on things being posted by other people, or join in on trending conversations within your network.