How to build a brand on Twitter for FREE! (Part 2)

Yesterday we started the series on building a brand on Twitter and today we will continue that series with a post discussing how often you should tweet.

How often should I tweet?
There are millions and millions of Twitter users on the Internet and your tweets represent the smallest of a fraction you could ever imagine. Unless you have millions of followers, the chances that a lot of people will see all your tweets and click on links are very small. But don't be despondent, this can work to your advantage as well.

I have over 50,000 followers on Twitter. Think about this. What do you think the chances of everyone reading and actioning any single tweet I make are? Actually, the number is very small. Twitter is a bit like a fire hose, you spray water everywhere; it's not a direct pressure jet of water that is directed specifically at something. And this is an important fact to remember. What does it mean? Well, actually it means that if I tweet one thing at 8am and then a very similar thing at 9am, there's a good chance that the tweet will be seen by different people. But, if I only have 10 followers, then they will all most likely see both of my tweets. So, follower numbers are important as a ratio to tweet frequency too.

As a general ratio, for every 10,000 followers you have you can tweet the same thing one time per day. So in my case, I can safely send the same tweet out 5 times a day without worry that people will notice I'm spamming them. But - and here's the important other factor - you have to intersperse your tweets with other tweets so that anyone looking through your timeline doesn't see the repeated pattern. A reasonable timeline that anyone looking back through will be about 20 tweets or so. Taking my example further, this means that if I am to repeat a tweet 5 times a day and I need to create 20 tweets between each repeat, then I should be tweeting about 100 times a day! Now that's a lot more than I currently tweet. In fact I guess I send out around 50-60 tweets a day. This means I shouldn't repeat the same tweet more than twice a day.

But the question still remains, how often should I tweet? The simple answer is that the more followers you have and the more you want to build a brand, the more you should tweet - up to a limit of about 6 tweets an hour (above that and it will be impossible to follow you). This means you need to build your Twitter following as an urgent task (read this post about how to build 16,000+ followers). Then you can increase your tweet frequency appropriately.

Tweeting 50 times a day (for me) is a lot of tweeting so I have automated much of the process. That will be the  topic of tomorrow's discussion.