To Tweet or Not To Tweet…
I have kind of fallen out of love with Twitter. Don’t ask me why, for there is no reason. When I open it, I can chat away on it for hours, but for some reason I just never open the tab for it anymore. I think it is because I was using it a lot, sharing my posts, and when I was promoting a book, I used it to promote my links. This was one on a regular basis, and so, I also felt the need to tweet a lot in between. I didn’t want to look like a complete spammer.
Are you a real boy?
Since my book has been removed from sale – pending its republication with MayDecember publications, my need to use twitter on such a regular basis has gone. I have had several conversations with people about how to use twitter, and to say that people’s answers and opinions differed would be a waste of time. However, the majority of people said there was no need to use twitter ever hour or what-have-you.
So, I ask you, when it comes to twitter;
How much is too much?
The answers I have heard range from three times a day to as often as possible because you don’t want to be forgotten.
Personally, I think that the answer lies somewhere in between. To a large extent it does depend on your purpose. Are you tweeting to chat, to network, or to sell something. Living outside of the US, I knew that the majority of my audience was on a different timezone to me, and so would tweet more in my afternoon and evening because that was when the Americas started to wake up and so I saw a direct, positive effect for my efforts.
Another factor of course is how many followers you have, and to a degree, how many they have. Twitter is a living breathing engine, and it is constantly updating itself. If you have 150 followers, and follow 150 people, then tweeting three or four times a day might well be effective. If however, you have 250,000 followers and follow 100,00 tweeting once an hour may be more beneficial simply because your words will be lost in a sea of twit-babble.
I am planning to get back into Twitter, and when I do it will be at a slower tempo, after all, too much of a good thing makes it bad.
How often do you send out a tweet?
What about the re-tweet, does this count as interaction, or do the same rules apply. Does an account that is nothing but re-tweets appear less than genuine? I love the re-tweet button, and hope I don’t overuse it. Although I will admit, I do not always read the links that I am re-tweeting. Bad isn’t it. But this is only for those people I know well, and whose posts I always enjoy.
Do you re-tweet? Do you do it for links, funny tweets or a mixture of the two?
