Counting Your Tweets!

In one my recent conversations, someone said “I have a target of posting 2500 tweets every month on behalf brand I work for”. Wow! That one statement threw open a world of ‘article ideas’ for me.

1. Is that how you measure productivity on social media?
2. That makes it more than 100 tweets a (working) day. Then how many a day is acceptable?
3. Where do you generate the content to tweet about 100 times a day? Where do you generate any content to tweet about?
4. Who is going to put up a tweet every five minutes? What tools can be used to manage the overload of tweets we send or receive?
5. How many people does a brand need to put up that many tweets?

Well, this list can go on and on but this post cannot. I am not sure if I can handle all these questions in my future posts but today I am going to talk about the first one.

How much is too much?!

The number of tweets posted everyday day is of course a very important factor as it gives the brand’s followers more reasons to engage with the brand.  On Twitter, as context is the most important factor, everybody needs a reason to talk to another.

If I put up a tweet that read “Hi. How are you?” to someone, there is miniscule likelihood that I get a response. I, for one, do not respond to such tweets. Instead, if I got a tweet (even if it is from a stranger) as a response to a tweet that I put up, I’d reply accordingly.

So, any tweet that a brand puts up, acts as a context/ reason for followers to reply or retweet. Ceteris Paribus, the more you tweet, the more you can engage.

This works seamlessly, when the brand we are talking about is a content platform. In that case, there is no dearth of content in your business. The more content you have, the more ‘dope’ you have to tweet about. The issue of content generation does not exist.

On the other hand, if you are in the business of generating content and you are measured by how many people read it, then the number of tweets you put out is perhaps directly proportional to the number of clicks you get. Let’s take NDTV for example; a majority of their tweets are plugs for their articles. Well, obviously, because their business is to make more people read their content. And they monetise your reading their content by selling ad space on their pages. The metric works better because it helps monetise your business.

However, if you were a brand that is in the business of selling products, this could be a much tougher game. How can we expect, let’s say, TataDocomo to post 100 times a day? In their case, they mostly resort to news, promotional material, interviews, contests etc to feed reasons for engagement. Running 5 contests a day would be a tad too tacky!