How Often Should You Tweet?

In this article I want to pound on one concept that is absolutely critical to being a successful Twitter user. And that concept is frequency. Much more so than in any other medium (online or off), frequency is critical. I follow a couple thousand people and Marketing Companies Birmingham, and some people follow many more than that. So when I log in to Twitter, I see different names all the time...with a few exceptions. And those exceptions are the people who are keeping their name and marketing message in front of as many people as possible.

So how often is often enough? The answer to that question could probably be calculated with some certainty using a mathematical formula of that considered the number of users your followers each follow. Unfortunately, most Twitter users have many followers, which would make this a difficult and time consuming task.

The ideal situation would be to have a thousand Twitter followers business consultants birmingham who each follow only one person: you. In this situation, Tweeting once per day would be enough. A more realistic scenario is that you have one thousand followers, who each follow one thousand other people. Assuming that each of those people posts an average of five times per day, that is five thousand tweets per day floating drifting through each account. Let's say that there are twenty hours per day when active twittering is happening. Twenty hours times sixty minutes gives us twelve hundred minutes.

Dividing the total tweets by the total minutes:

5,000 tweets / 1,200 minutes = 4.2 tweets per minute.

Or:

Tweets per Minute = Total Tweets / Total Minutes

Assuming an equal distribution of tweets throughout the active twenty hour period, there are more than four new tweets every minute. The Twitter interface shows twenty or so tweets, so in five minutes, a tweet will be pushed completely off the page. You would want to tweet every five minutes to always be on your users' screens. In other words:

Tweet Exposure Time = Tweets on Page / Tweets per Minute

Or:

Tweet Exposure Time = Tweets on Page / (Total Tweets / Total Minutes)

You could probably take the time to actually calculate this, but it will be a pain. And I really don't know how accurate it is to assume five average tweets per day. It could be way higher than that; or lower, depending on your circumstances. You could audit a set of your followers and get an average.

The formula for the number of times you will need to tweet in a day is:

Number of Tweets = 20 X (60/(20/(Number of Users X 5)/1,200)))

NT = 20(60/(20/(5NU/1200)))

So if you plus your number of followers into the above formula, you will get an estimate of how many times you need to tweet to constantly keep your name in front of your followers. It is probably a big number. So after going through all this math, the final point is this: tweet a lot!