I follow some very successful Twitter users and noticed they tweeted a lot, which inspired me to try the experiment I’ll outline in this post.
For several weeks, I tweeted the same type of content I always have — just more often. On average, I tweet about once an hour, for seven to ten hours each week day. I noticed that the active, high quality Twitter users that I follow tend to tweet at least three times per hour, so I decided to emulate their process and also tweet two or three times per hour.
The result? I saw no noticeable change in the number of mentions, @replies or retweets (RT) of my posts during and after the experiment. I normally receive an average of five to eight mentions per day and that’s how much I saw during the experiment, too, even when I doubled or tripled my tweets.
Since the experiment, I’ve returned to my pre-experiment tweet average. Since upping my tweet quantity didn’t appear to have any value, there’s no reason to bombard my followers with more tweets.
I asked people on Twitter why they thought the experiment hadn’t made an impact. Many people responded that it’s the quality of posts, rather than the quantity, that makes all the difference, and there were also some responses that suggested I should have also tried changing when I posted, rather than sticking to my usual schedule.
For me, this provides some evidence that quantity doesn’t matter much in social media, although I still don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules.
Have you tried a similar experiment? Did you get different results?
A lot of people are interested in anything FAMOUS people have to say. John Mayer could say “I just farted” and get 834 mentions.
Since you aren’t famous, you need to something interesting if you want anyone to care. Alternatively, you could just post incredibly inane things, like this blog article, and people may mention you just to make fun.
Haha. Good point there, Meks. I should’ve mentioned the types of people that I emulated. These are not celebrities. They’re business people. No, I am not talking the Kawasakis and Godins.
you should tweet about weed
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Nice experiment!
Although I agree with the quality part, it is also important to create momentum. There are so many articles out there that in order to stick out you do need to get the ball running.
Especially when you are just beginning. When you are receiving more visitors, people will get the ball rolling for you. (if they like your content)
P.S.
I use Tweetdeck and if someone tweets too much it get’s annoying and I’ll unfollow them.
I am actually surprised it didn’t work! maybe it depends on industry niche or some such. Cause I have tried it with couple of my company accounts and it seemed to work.
But with social media I feel we should always be ready for surprises for what works and what doesn’t.
[...] My Twitter Quantity Experiment – WebWorkerDaily [...]
I’ve noticed that a lot of people who tweet a lot, are usually sending out tweets in response to someone else. There may be a lot of mentions, but it’s more of a conversation than a straight up retweet. My guess is if you could get people into regular conversations, you would see those numbers up. Not sure if that would have “business value” but it might drive the numbers.
Quantity doesn’t matter to a certain extent, but consistency does.