Saturday, February 9, 2013

TWEETS - How much is too much?

I admit it – I still consider myself a Twitter newbie. I forget to hashtag words in my tweets, I often hit the Retweet button instead of copying a person’s tweet and putting RT in front of it and my tweets go over the 140 character limit and I have to figure out what to cut.

I also do not tweet all the time.

For me, I have two reasons and they are very simple: I don’t tweet unless I have something I really want to say and I don’t want to annoy people with a plethora of words clogging their feed.

But, what I want to know is, how many tweets per day is considered too much? Would up to five tweets be considered average? Would 10 tweets per day be the limit? Would upwards of 20 tweets per day be considered excessive?

There is a person that I am following and, I kid you not, tweets, on an average, of nine per hour. Between this morning and February 1, this person has tweeted over 1,130 times! Some tweets are replies, some are directed towards people, a few are retweets (very few) and the rest are personal tweets. Is this typical? Is this over-the-top crazy?

Here is a sample:

Feb 1 – 183 tweets
Feb 2 – 122 tweets
Feb 3 – 92 tweets
Feb 4 – 90 tweets
Feb 5 – 242 tweets
Feb 6 – 173 tweets
Feb 7 – 142 tweets
Feb 8 – 74 tweets

So far today, there have been 32 tweets and it's not even noon!

In my opinion, that is just beyond extreme and this person needs to chill out with the tweets. I actually stopped using Twitter for a few weeks because I couldn’t read anything important in my feed. This person’s tweets were appearing five, six times in a row and I spent too much time trying to scroll through all of the person’s messages to get to tweets I actually needed to read, that I just gave up.

When I use Twitter, I want to read things that people or companies are doing and how I can learn from their message. I don’t want to be bombarded by messages (especially the same message over and over and over). Give me a link to click on if you want me to read more. If it sounds interesting, I can guarantee you, I will click on it.

So, I ask you:
How often do you tweet an hour? A day? Do you just tweet random things? Do you constantly push whatever you are writing/selling/marketing/promoting?  If you are an excessive or an extreme tweeter, why?

What do you look for when you read other people’s tweets? What do you consider too much? What makes you stop following a person?

I’m curious about what you think and how you use Twitter.

Until next time ~