Last September I was on a panel with Guy Kawasaki talking about Twitter. He said at the time that he Tweeted 4 times for every story that he wrote. FOUR TIMES! The exact same Tweet. I couldn’t believe it. His rationale was that he found that his audience was tuning into Twitter at several different times during the day and he found that four was the optimal number to convert enough of the people reading his posts into traffic back to his website.
I asked him whether he was worried that he was turning off potential followers who didn’t want their streams flooded every day with Guy Kawasaki Tweets. He argued that anybody who followed enough people wouldn’t really notice much of a difference and if they followed so few people that they were significantly flooded then they were the wrong followers for him [on this point I'll never agree - I strive not to overwhelm any followers]. At the time I had a small enough group of people I followed that if anybody was in overdrive on posting for a day I always noticed (as I pointed out in Point 2 in this post).
I left the panel thinking that Guy was off base but realizing he had somewhat of a point. I’ve argued previously that Twitter is a new form of curated RSS and in many ways it is. But it is a transient RSS reader. If you’re not logged in for a few hours and stuff passes through the pipes then it’s gone. It’s true that there are ways to make sure you don’t miss stuff (like lists or segmenting traffic in TweetDeck) but most people don’t employ these techniques. They just consume Twitter when they’re hungry for a conversation or some news right now.
So I started experimenting with multiple Tweets. In particular I would schedule some Tweets (using CoTweet, which lets you schedule Tweets) to go out around 5.40am (in time for East Coast 8.40am consumption) and then again at 8.40am for West Coast time. In fact, that is what I plan to do for this post. I’ll finish writing around 1am and that’s a dumb time to Tweet because few people in the US are online. Sometimes I would send a Tweet at 7pm and then again at 7.30am the next morning. I wanted to see two things:
- Would the second (or sometimes even third Tweet) convert enough people to my blog to make it worth potentially annoying some people on Twitter?
- would I get a reaction from the Twitter community telling me it was too much?
I’d like to share my conclusions with you but then also ask you for feedback. Many people reading today’s blog post would have seen it by clicking through on Twitter. My questions for you:
- how often do you notice my second Tweet? I’m going on the premise that on most days most users don’t notice. Some will notice it all the time (either because you follow 70 or less people or because you’re often on Twitter)
- how badly does it bother you when you do see a second Tweet? Do you think to yourself, “I can understand why he’d send it twice because many people might not see the first one” or “man, is that annoying. I wish Mark wouldn’t do that.” (I promise not to be offended by your answers – I’m trying to get a feel for the norm myself).
My conclusions
-
If your goal is to send a Tweet that converts to people to a blog post sending more than one Tweet is recommended. I would assert that people following you by definition are more likely to want to see content from you and therefore you’re better off sending 2 versus 1 Tweets (we’ll see from feedback on this site whether others feel the same way). As an example you can see from my awe.sm logs a recent morning that 399 people clicked on my link on Twitter the night before at 7pm. I send out a second Tweet at 7am and by 8.30am I already had 224 clicks. This number often passes the first number by the end of the day. If I sent out a third Tweet later (I didn’t) it likely would get about 50% as much as the morning one. This means that there are still many people who haven’t seen it and would like to.
Note that these numbers only measure people who clicked on that exact link. Many people swap out my short URL code and put in their own so I don’t capture 100% of the total clicks with the codes but if you look at the overall traffic from that morning on my blog you’ll see that my Twitter link accounts for about 15% of the morning traffic to my blog (this percentage will drop by the end of the day as more people arrive via RSS readers or referrals) and last night’s link accounted for about 10% of the daily traffic.
So my conclusion is that the second Tweet is generally worth it. The third probably is also but I usually resist the temptation in the desire to balance “reach” with “frequency” soas not to piss people (you!) off.
2. I try not to “double Tweet” every day and I vary the time of day just to shake it up a bit. You’l see from this morning’s logs that my post today was featured prominently on Hacker News. This always leads to a spike in traffic. I could already see this by early AM so in this case I didn’t think it was worth RT’ing to get another 200 viewer through the door.
3. The smartest strategy I’ve seen is implemented by Babak Nivi over at VentureHacks. He’ll send out multiple Tweets linking to the same story but with totally different text. What he does is pulls out specific quotes from the story and then Tweets those but linking back to the same story. I find that this is more palatable for me than seeing the same Tweet 4 times (but has the downside of potentially driving people your blog post that they may have already seen).
4. I also try to mix up my Tweets with a combo of Tweets linking to my blog, Tweets making general comments like where I’m going that night and some Tweets where I ask a question to engage the audience (obviously where I generally want to know something). I think this is important – otherwise your Twitter feed just becomes, literally, an RSS reader.
So, whaddaya think?
(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table )
Re using different tweets as bait to get click throughs is a bit like trying different chat up lines on the same girl. Give it your best shot as a one-liner sure, but maybe better to work harder at the conversation.
That said, I think re-posting same content at different times is okay. A good tv show / song / book / film deserves a second airing so why not your tweet if it links to good content and migth reach an audience who would otherwise miss it.
btw – do you also reschedule second / repeat tweets of other people’s content – or just your own?
Two tweets are fine for me. Four tweets are a bit annoying.
Good post. I remember seeing Guy Kawasaki say the same thing, and I had a similar reaction. After some thought, I came to similar conclusions with similar strategies.
One other thing to consider here: network effects. Many people will see your tweets via retweet (or mention), either because they miss your tweet or because they don’t follow you. When you tweet your post multiple times, it increases the likelihood that people in extended networks will see it.
You read my head! To date I have only been tweeting a post once – right after I write it, which is usually 8 or 9 at night EST. I feel like it gets lost, but I’ve never wanted to push it more than that for fear of driving people away from, instead of to my blog.
I think your points are well taken and I plan to increase my tweeting – hopefully in a very tasteful way.
Thank you,
Mary Pat
My thought is multiple tweets with varying text is necessary until we achieve critical mass. Which in this case means we get massive traffic to our blogs everyday without any promotion.
I use Twitter as a form of RSS.
Many of the people I follow, tweet their posts once a day at around 7am EST. By the time I get up in California and get my laptop running, those tweets are ancient history. I’ve probably had 300-400 tweets come in since then.
If they don’t tweet their post again that day, I simply won’t see it.
I have had it commented to me that since I am fairly active on Twitter (20 or more tweets a day) , if I don’t tweet my posts more than once, they will get lost in the stream of my own tweets.
I guess it depends a lot on how you use twitter, but I get frustrated when people ask if I’ve seen a tweet they sent 4 hours before I even get up!
I tweet 3 times a day and use different text. I get the biggest response from my morning and evening posts – but also get a fair response from the lunchtime post.
Good post. Thanks!
I found this post through a couple of retweets. I don’t mind people tweeting a blog post several times a day. It makes sense – I was in a convo with a friend yesterday and she missed a tweet I had sent just a few minutes prior!
What is really annoying is the people who use their twitter account as an RSS feed – where the only thing you see from them is a post link. I also get annoyed when people send out three tweets in a row from their post.
Sometimes, I like when people use different lines from their post, but sometimes it annoys me. That’s why I like tweet deck – it gives you a preview of the long url so I can see the link name and don’t have to waste time visiting the blog again and again.
You need to study your users and time zones if you want to repeat tweets.
We always preface repeated tweets with “r/t ” and tell anyone who complains of a retweeted tweet to simply avoid those.
Repeating 5-8 of the most popular tweets ONCE each day get about 150,000 additional clicks via our @Twitter_Tips account.
About twice a year we will repeat very popular tweets as well, making the total repetition four times over the course of a year. Obviously this will not work for more topical content.
One tweet and one tweet only please.
I think your whole point is proved by me finding your post.
My twitter app has been collecting and sharing twitter usage statistics for a while now. I have found I get the best response from sharing links comes when I share something right before the peak times of usage. Here’s my hypothesis: if you show up in someone’s timeline right before the swarm of tweet you don’t get lost in the stream.
Mytheory seems to work well, but I your post has inspired me to test it objectively.
I’m also doing 4 tweets on my daily posts. Sometimes, if post is more popular than usual, 5 tweets. More than 5 tweets a day can be really annoying. At least for me.
I think that multiple tweets to the same landing page but with different text is a huge mistake. After a while, people will wonder, “Did I already click on this? It sounds familiar.”
By keeping them identical except for URL, you don’t confuse people. They will “know” they already clicked and shouldn’t click again.
If you change up the text, they will be confused, go to the same story twice, and never trust your tweets again.
Guy is right and I’m reluctant to change the text because somebody might get fooled into clicking twice thinking it’s a different story. Lately I’ve taken to writing a slightly different Tweet but saying something like “Last night’s post” or “Weekend post” and then the same Tweet text. But I always try to make it clear it was the original post.
twice is enough , i tweet quotes and in intervals tweet my old post.
I think it depends how many followers you have and how often ppl check their tweets. More than once can be OK sometimes as ppl who check daily may check at different times in the day. I probably wouldn’t tweet the same blog post on different days as it is generally expected to be a different blog.
I’m @DualVitality and have just tweeted your blog post. Feel free to comment on mine as I tweet them, thanks!
Great post! This makes a lot of sense, now I will begin tweeting more!