Sharing on Twitter: When and How Often?
Posted on Wed, Apr 06, 2011
I have friends and colleagues who benefit from using Twitter strictly as a newsfeed. Businesses, on the other hand, are on Twitter to generate followers and customers, which requires sharing compelling content on a consistent and regular basis. In this second installment of my series on the Ten Best Business Practices for Twitter, I look at questions about sharing content on Twitter.
How Often Should You Tweet?
There are various schools of thought on the answer to this question, pushing the issue of quantity over quality of tweets. As most tweets have a short life [as illustrated in the chart below from social media monitoring firm Sysomos], many businesses have opted to tweet constantly to stay top of mind, tweeting several times an hour.
From my perspective, tweeting constantly to stay top of mind with potential followers is not the right way to go. I think the best policy is to share meaningful content on a consistent basis throughout the day (5 - 12 times a day), making sure to space out tweets. Cramming tweets into tight time frames is less likely to generate much in click throughs, retweets or mentions. Spacing out tweets also enables you to see what tweets resonate with your followers.
Is it OK to share the same tweet more than once?
The answer to this question is YES, particularly as it relates to a link to your website or blog. Your followers will tune into their Twitter stream at different times during the day and might miss interesting information that you are posting. While it is important not to flood your Twitter stream, there is nothing wrong with putting out the same information again. News broadcasters on television and radio do this all the time.
Guy Kawasaki, accomplished author, internet entrepreneur and technology marketer, who has over 330,000 Twitter followers, typically tweets the same links four times eight hours apart. I checked his Twitter stream while writing this post to verify this and I did.
As he is Guy, he can get away with using the same text. I recommend that businesses share the same content several times, but share it in different ways each time. Experimentation will help determine what types of tweets generate the most click throughs, retweets and mentions.
When are the best times to share content on Twitter?
From an overall macro perspective, The Social Media Guide found that noon EST is the best time to tweet as you hitting "three major break times": 1) office arrivals on the West Coast, 2) before lunch on the East Coast and 3) end of day in the UK and Europe.
In terms of timing tweets to maximize retweets, analysis from Dan Zarrella of Hubspot shows that the afternoon is the best time.
Regardless of this information, I think it is most important to be tweeting when your followers are most likely to engage with your content. In fact, there are now companies and tools that help businesses do this.
For example, Social Flow, Betaworks company, has built a platform designed to help clients dynamically publish content at times when it will resonate best with its customers or with the audiences they are seeking to reach. Social Flow's platform benefits from click through data secured from fellow Betaworks company bit.ly, the leading URL shortener.
What is your experience with sharing on Twitter? When do you enjoy the most traction? And why? I look forward to your thoughts.