If you are a social media manager who wants to maximize your time, you need to know how often should you tweet. Your time is valuable! Tweeting enough times in a day to reach your goals without doing work you don’t have to is an important balance.
One of the challenges in answering this question is that most of the major research about this question is two or three years old. Since Twitter has both introduced and updated a new algorithm to their feed, that research is now not very helpful. What was true with a purely chronological feed doesn’t apply anymore. To be successful using Twitter for your business marketing, you need to adjust your strategy.
Why Does Twitter’s Algorithm Matter?
In 2016, research revealed more overall views of your Twitter content for posting up to 50 times per day. This led to strategies including reposting content multiple times per day, and trying to create as many short snippets as possible.
Then there were two big changes.
- Twitter introduced its algorithm, meaning most recent did not always mean more visible
- Twitter upped its character count limit from 140 to 280
Clearly, they were making a move to reward more thoughtful content. Now, your content can be moved to the top based on a number of factors. Timing does still matter – what Twitter calls “recency.” But it is not the only thing that can push your tweet to the top. According to Twitter, the other factors are:
- Inclusion of images and video is preferred
- Amount of interaction the Tweet gets (such as retweets and likes)
- How connected you are to the person viewing the content. If you interact with each other, you are both more likely to see each other’s content.
- Other factors showing a relationship with other users. This includes how long you have been following each other, and how you connected.
- How interested a person is in your content (determined by other things they have engaged with in the past, and how engaging your content is overall)
You will notice two words keep coming up over and over again; relationship and engagement.
How Often Should You Tweet?
Now that we have a lot of data about how often to tweet, what do we do with that? What can we use to actually impact our strategy?
The first thing is to know that understanding your own individual audience is more important than ever. How often should you tweet is related not to only the platform, but also to your unique clients and customers. What will work for one business, might not be as effective for another.
A good place to start is to look at your Twitter Audience Insights. This will show you things like the breakdown of men and women, top interests, and education levels.
