Should You Be Tweeting 80 Times A Day?
When it comes to Twitter, there is so much advice to implement that you literally could be spending half your workday optimizing your Twitter ads, finding content to tweet about, writing original content to tweet about, monitoring your account, monitoring trends, searching for new people to follow, managing your following and unfollowing...and the list goes on! There’s a tool for just about every one of those tasks, and that could add up to hundreds of dollars per month—solely spent on Twitter.
If you’re like me, you are a Twitter minimalist. When I come across reports, like this one from the (amazing) team at Social Quant, I feel a tad overwhelmed. And, I claim to know what I’m doing for myself and for my clients on Twitter. In reading the first few paragraphs, I’m already worried that I’m not doing enough.
The Top 20% are tweeting more than 80 times per DAY! Imagine trying to fill your queue with crafty, curated and original content EACH DAY. It’s just not going to happen. And, this is where I think marketing begins to fall short.
Engagement Per Tweet - Social Quant Kim Garst
We begin looking at graphs, stats and facts. We realize to achieve those statistics, we must sacrifice the hands-on approach. We must forget that we are dealing with real people. We must ignore that most of our followers do NOT want us to appear in their stream 80x per day. Sure, they may click or engage with a tweet that comes across, especially during the honeymoon period.
But, what I’d love to see is a survey that asks our followers whether they would unfollow someone if that person tweeted 80 times per day—and they realized it.
This is one example of the shift marketing is taking. Automation is king. One-on-one communication is sacrificed in exchange for a click, a like or a follow. And, we wonder why buyers are no longer responding as we expected.
For those of us in marketing who still cling to the authenticity as a business model approach, we might not be publishing reports about our stellar numbers or CTRs. We might understate the results we are seeing from our programs. We might not even need crazy amounts of traffic to build our businesses. (gasp!) We might only need to focus on a niche market and get a very select few to engage with us on social media.
This means we take a radically different approach from “broadcast as much as possible and hope for the best.” We tweet less. We tweet strategically. We take our time engaging with people. We look for conversations that really matter to our audience. We engage with individuals in our audience. And, we do this in a reasonable timeframe.
When people ask me how they can replicate X competitor’s social following or web traffic results in the next 90 days, I realize there’s some education that needs to happen. Comparing ourselves to competitors can be valuable at times, when we learn what they are doing well, what they aren’t and what could be improved. But, a strong social following is not the only measure of success.
Your business is different. You are not your competitor, nor should you strive to be just like them. Even if you managed to, you would not be filling your niche in the market, where your business could shine.
As for my own site, my goal is not to be one of the marketers raving about all of the website traffic I drive, X number of followers I can get in a month or how I can create an epic marketing automation system that will rival Hubspot.
What I can stand behind is exactly what brought me into marketing—my passion for helping people build relationships with the people that matter. It’s matchmaking, pure and simple.
Your Turn: Which approach to marketing actually generates the best results for you? I’d be curious to hear whether you’ve tested alternate marketing strategies and whether you were satisfied with the results. Tweet me @MindiRRosser or shoot me an email if you’d like to discuss!
