On Social Media

Generating revenue along with the buzz.

I’m a heavy Twitter user. I love how fast it moves. If you are looking for instant feedback on anything, Twitter is the place to test your content or messaging. It’s also the place to get answers to your questions. And it’s the best listening device on the Internet. You can search for keywords, customers, competition, and industry thought leaders and find out what everyone is thinking. And no one even knows you are listening.

The most effective use of Twitter, however, is to drive traffic. If you are writing articles or developing original content of any kind — blogs, photographs, podcasts, videos — Twitter is a fantastic place to make connections and build a community. That’s not news, of course. More and more people have come to understand the power of Twitter. But here’s a question that can bring very different answers — even from people with a lot of experience on Twitter:

How many times can you share the same piece of content? How do you strike a balance between making sure you reach all of your followers and making sure you don’t annoy all of your followers?

I have my own point of view on this, which I will share later in this post, but first I want to tell you what I learned when I sought guidance from the Twitterverse:

Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop and a Twitter icon with more that 1.1 million followers says, “Repeat your tweets four times, eight hours apart! If you do it that way you will always catch Pacific Coast prime time, which is early evening.”

But doesn’t that much sharing irritate people? “You are always going to upset .01 percent of the people,” Mr. Kawasaki said. “If you turn on CNN at 3 a.m., CNN repeats stories all day long — because they know people watch them at different times of the day. People in different time zones and people in the same time zone visit Twitter at different times, so you need to keep posting your content to accommodate all these people.”

Stephanie Chandler, an author and president of Authority Publishing, a social media firm based in Sacramento, Calif., said the following: “I retweet most new blog posts eight to 10 times over 90 days. My experience is that people don’t care when the post was written as long as it is still relevant. Also, since so many tweets are missed because we aren’t all logged in at the same time, it’s essential to repeat your tweets.”

Now, I probably retweet as much as anyone on Twitter, so here’s what I think. When I publish a fresh piece of content, I always share it four times — every three hours the first day it is released. As the week goes on, I reduce the number of times it’s tweeted. I use analytics to help me decide what content to keep sharing past the first week.

All told, I tweet an average of 34 times a day during week days. On Wednesdays, I actually tweet even more, because that’s when I host #Smallbizchat, a weekly tweetchat where a guest and I answer small-business questions live.

There are some things that I tweet seven times a week, like an announcement of who my chat guest will be and an explanation of how to participate. I also publish a transcript of the chat interview as a blog post every Thursday, and I share that heavily, too.

Here are a few pointers I’ve picked up along the way:

You risk turning people off if all you do is promote your own content. But if you share other people’s stuff generously, you will first build trust and then a following.

I spend an hour a day figuring out what I plan to share. I use Hootsuite, and I typically work Twitter first thing in the morning.

Create a Twitter all-star list. I have a private list of 50 to 75 Twitter-users whose content I know and trust. They are a constant source of great content to share.

Use helpful plugins. I use a WordPress plugin called Tweet Old Post, which randomly pulls content from my blog and shares it on Twitter every four hours.

Go into Twitter three times a day — do not leave your account on autopilot. Make sure you to respond to people and do live retweeting.

It took 18 months of daily tweeting before I felt I had established my identity. It works for me because I treat Twitter like a job. You can do it too, one tweet at a time.

Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development firm. You can follow her on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/how-many-times-can-you-tweet-the-same-tweet/?partner=rss&emc=rss