A client recently started their first Twitter account, and asked us "How often should I tweet?" A legitimate question, for sure.
And here is the answer we gave that wasn't what they really wanted to hear: "Much more often than you think."
Why is that?
Short Attention Spans
As a Columbus Ohio website design and marketing firm, we talk about this a lot. And as we've say often in our blog posts, we are ALL members of The Short Attention Span Society. Twitter caters to the short attention span in us all. By its nature, it is intended to let us absorb a few bits of information at a time.
Now think how you consume Twitter (if you do). Short bits of time, scattered throughout the day when you have a few minutes. Now imagine if you tweet once a day, say in the morning. If a chunk of your audience only reads their feeds in the afternoons, your tweets would have been buried so far down they would not see them.
This article about how often you should tweet, says you should tweet a minimum of three times a day.
Cover a range of subject matter
Most newbies tend to tweet about what they're doing, which most people don't care about. Look at tweeting like you look at your marketing. Or as you SHOULD look at your marketing. What you communicate shouldn't be about you, but about what is of interest to your audience. More specifically, what you can share with them that will make their lives better, easier, or more informed.
Which leads us back to the marketing philosophy...
Content is King
If you haven't heard the phrase Content is King, you've not been following online marketing closely enough over the past few years. The marketing and SEO communities have been promoting this for a few years. If you create content your audience wants to know about because it helps them in their jobs or lives, the more they will come back to your site to read it. And the more likely they will be to share it with others.
No one wants to hear about you
Or more specifically, no one wants to hear you talk about how awesome you are. That's not marketing. And twitter for business IS marketing. Your audience wants to know what you can do for them to make their lives better. To help them get better at their jobs.
If you can offer information that makes your audience become more informed, that is what they'll want to read.
And while it should be educational and engaging, it can also be entertaining. We like to share awesome marketing we run across, even if it's not something we've done.
Twitter isn't a science (yet).
Nor is most marketing. And while you can measure the reach of your tweets, the subjects and frequency are going to vary by company (or individual).
You have to get into it yourself and see what works for you and your company.
And finally, remember: tweeting is like ANY marketing effort: if you don't do it well out of the gate, anyone seeing a bad first shot at it, will probably not bother to give it a second shot.
Wondering how get Twitter followers?
We ran across this great post on twiends.com talking about the best way to get Twitter followers. It seems to cover pretty much every aspect of expanding your following we could imagine, so we think it'd be helpful for you to take some time to look it over, too.
We wish you the best of luck expanding your Twitter following in 2020!
