What happens when you tweet too much? A better question would be how much is too much?
Yesterday I got a question from one of my Twitter followers and decided to respond in the form of a blog post. @MarahMedia asked:
How many tweets per day do you think is an acceptable number to be engaging to followers without seeming too “spammy”?
I think there’s a couple questions here. The first is a question of quantity: how many tweets are too many tweets? At what point might your followers seem overwhelmed? I’m not sure there’s a single right answer. I’m a fairly heavy twitter user, and I will often tweet 20-30 times (or more) per day from my @ahockley account. Some of these are original tweets, some are retweets, and some are @replies to specific users. I wouldn’t worry too much about pure quantity… just as there’s no one single way that folks read Twitter, there’s no single quantity of tweets that’s “right” for Twitter.
The second question is how to avoid appearing spammy. In my mind this gets more to a question of how many of your tweets are self-promotion versus how many are general conversation or promoting the work of others. A few months ago I wrote about how to promote your blog on Twitter without being spammy, but a couple quick guidelines would be that your self-promotional tweets should be a minority… and a significant minority. Chris Brogan routinely talks about promoting others’ content twelve times for each one time that one promotes their own content.
Here’s some specific examples of how I’ll engage in self promotion for my photography on Twitter:
- When I post on the blog for my photography services, a link is sent to my Twitter stream. I always schedule blog posts for the morning.
- Later that same day (approximately 6-7 hours later), I’ll tweet a similar link, preceded by “Earlier:” so that folks know it’s something I posted earlier. Because folks won’t read everything posted on Twitter, it means that if you only tweet about something once, a good portion of your followers may never see it.
- I’ll tweet about projects or clients as I work with them, but generally no more than a couple tweets per day during the project or photoshoot.
- I’ll occasionally post a teaser as I get ready to launch a new service or project. My 20art10 project is an example of this – I posted a few teasers before launching the sale of Rural Winter which is the first print in the project.
That’s it. Of my 20+ tweets per day, it’s rare that more than a few will be self-promotional for my photography business. The rest of my tweets are conversational, discussions of everyday life, tweets about photography (but not directly promoting my work), or promotions of others’ work.
What do you think? How much self-promotion is too much self-promotion?
Photo by venetianeye, used under Creative Commons licensing
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