Is it worthwhile to repeat yourself?

Most folks who have a blog and use Twitter will send a tweet that links to a new blog post (either manually or through an automated means). That’ll drive traffic, but how many of your Twitter followers will see it?

TweetHint: not all of them. Probably not even a majority of them. If someone is following more than a few people on Twitter, they’re not reading everything. Twitter users drift in and out of the stream of tweets, catching whatever happens to flow by while they watch. If you’re tweeting while someone happens to be away, your tweet probably isn’t being seen.

One way to help your tweet reach more viewers is to repeat the tweet. One option is an automated tweet scheduling service such as that offered by FutureTweets or SocialOomph.

Another method (and the one which I use) is to manually post a tweet at a later point, referencing the post which someone might have missed. For example, see this tweet which was the automated tweet when my post-SXSW thoughts went live, and then I manually posted a follow-up tweet later that evening to catch a crowd that might not have seen the original one.

You don’t want to overdo it and post too many times… after all, the folks that are paying close attention don’t want to see you advertise the same post over and over and over, but I’d argue that tweeting a link 2-3 times is completely appropriate.

And so I ask… is it worthwhile to repeat yourself?

Photo by wonderferret, used under Creative Commons licensing

These other posts might be of interest to you:

  1. Future Blog Content: Schedule Your Posts
  2. Can You Tweet Too Much?
  3. 14 Things a Photographer Can Tweet About

Tagged as:
blogging,
promotion,
self-promotion,
tweets,
Twitter

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.

splatThe 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

These other posts might be of interest to you:

  1. How Many Times do you Tweet Links to Blog Posts?
  2. 14 Things a Photographer Can Tweet About
  3. Schedule Your Tweets? Should You? How To?

Tagged as:
Conversation,
self-promotion,
Twitter