Earlier today we, wait for it, lost a follower on Twitter because we “tweet too much”. Or, that guy doesn’t follow enough people (that’s the “we’re not wrong!” way to look at it, which is probably wrong). If this was a major multinational brand, the loss might be a reason to squirm, reevaluate and modify the entire strategy behind AgencySpy’s social media. But since this is just a blog, we asked our fine followers how many is too many. It is a community after all, and we want to maintain it. No seriously, I’m for serious.
A number of people responded:
-@ampagency: “as long as people care about them, tweet away!”
-@singmichele: “when someone occupies 75% of the spaces on my twitter page… i think that’s too many. (that’s not what you mean though, is it?)”
-@joshua_a_davies: “There is no such thing as too many tweets.”
-@beirutdriveby: “if the tweets are just minutes apart, 24/24, it might be a bit much..”
All good responses, some lending themselves to our ego more than others. But one answer was particularly interesting and ties into that whole “strategists love numbers” thing. @pattyman writes, “I think it’s more of a formula than a particular number.” The equation he created, probably in just a minute or so, actually sort of makes sense. Let’s work it out.
The Acceptable # Tweets = (the square root of people you follow divided by foursquare check-in-tweets) + (useful/inspirational links divided by pics of kids/cats).
Not bad. We’d probably swap #people you follow with #followers, and cats/kids with links to agencyspy content. And since we don’t do the whole foursquare check-in-tweet thing, let’s replace that with average hours per day where most of your audience is likely to regularly check twitter.
Our equation: (√12,866/10) + (1) note: we maintain about a 1:1 ratio agencyspy content to other relevant/interesting links).
After all the math, that means AgencySpy should tweet about 12 times per day. Well, this already doesn’t jive. We write about 12 posts per day, and since we maintain that 1:1 ration of our own links to interesting ones we’d have to cut that in half. Maybe that’s what we should do — or maybe we could modify @pattyman’s equation to include a “x 2” factor.
See, this social media stuff isn’t so hard!
More: “Twitter’s New Ad Model: Everything We’ve Learned So Far”