Finding the Tweets Per Day Sweet Spot, Part I

Do you use Twitter for professional purposes? Do you follow organizations that use Twitter as a news feed? If so, please participate in a LinkedIn poll focused on determining the optimal number of targeted tweets per day. The poll will be open until July 24, 2012, and the results will be beneficial to anyone who tweets on behalf of an organization. We'd love to get 500+ responses, which is absolutely possible with your votes and sharing help. Thanks in advance!

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If you follow @SMinOrgs on Twitter, then you're probably aware that we use it primarily as a news feed. We stream virtually all of the items shared via the SMinOrgs LI group there, in addition to posting original content and periodically retweeting content shared by others. Our general approach is to schedule tweets every two hours Monday-Friday from 8 am to 4 pm CT, with spontaneous posts interspersed throughout the day. Other than thank-you tweets, we generally do not post on the weekend. 

Given how active our LI group can be, our Twitter queue can get quite full, and I'm a little concerned that we may be tweeting too much. For the last two weeks, for example, we had scheduled posts going out virtually every hour, as well as spontaneous tweets, which resulted in 10+ tweets/day. For some people that may not seem like a lot, but to me it is. 

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance the value we provide, I queried the LI group to see what other people thought. Here’s what I asked, specifically:

1. Do you think the volume of SMinOrgs activity on Twitter is too high, just right, or not high enough?
2. Do you like the way we integrate LI and Twitter by tweeting out items shared via LI? Do you think we should continue as we have been or be a little stricter about what gets tweeted?
3. Would you like us to do more RTing (retweeting) of content shared by others on Twitter?
4. What do you think about the idea of creating a weekly "This week on @SMinOrgs" LI discussion item that recaps the unique activity on Twitter, focusing in particular on items we retweeted?

The initial responses to my questions inspired me to create a LI poll to see what people think is the optimum number of tweets from an organization. Understanding people's activity tolerance is a critical element of our decision making, of course, but it’s also relevant to others who use Twitter on behalf of an organization. Therefore, I have decided to share the poll and its results widely.

You can respond via the embedded poll below or directly on LI. We’re up to 67 votes already, and the results so far are enlightening and maybe even a bit surprising. I’m also getting some interesting comments on the various LI groups and other digital communities in which I’ve shared the question/poll.

The poll will be open until July 24, 2012. Once the poll closes I will write a follow up post reflecting what the poll and comments revealed, which should be particularly valuable to other organizations that use Twitter as a news feed. Please be sure to join us on one or more of our social media platforms and/or subscribe to the blog to be notified when the update is published.

I'd love to get 500+ responses, which is absolutely possible with your votes and sharing help. Thanks in advance!

- Courtney Shelton Hunt

 

Comments

[Courtney Shelton Hunt, PhD]

You can read the fascinating results of this poll here:

http://www.sminorgs.net/2012/08/the-tweets-per-day-sweet-spot-key-research-findings.html