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Sunday 8 March 2015

Tip: You are not tweeting enough


I saw a benchmark study recently, from HubSpot, and a couple of their Twitter benchmark stats made me worry.
HubSpot surveyed 7,000 of their customers, who I would anecdotally guess are more digitally and social savvy than the average business, on a ton of digital marketing topics.

Your business is not tweeting enough

The two stats that made me stop are how often these 7,000 businesses tweet, on average.
They averaged less than one tweet per day.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if your business is tweeting once a day, or less, than you really should not be on Twitter for your business.
You are leaving a ton of opportunity on the table.
The largest numbers (though still quite small) came from large companies (200+ employees) at 8.25 tweets per week and marketing services at 8.68 per week. Both of those are just barely over once a day.
hubspot tweets per week by company size hubspot tweets per week by industry
This is a basic misunderstanding for how Twitter is used.
Understanding the Twitter User
Based on various research studies out there, the average Twitter user is spending somewhere between 170 minutes to 250 minutes on Twitter each month. That is the average.
That comes out to 5 minutes a day, 1-2 sessions per day on average.
There are of course plenty who check in once a week or less. And plenty who are on Twitter all day.
But what all these users have in common is they are dipping their toe into the stream of Twitter when it is right for them. On their schedule.
If you are not posting, as a business, multiple times a day, every day of the week, you are missing out on large portions of your Twitter audience.

How often should you be posting to Twitter as a business?

There is no exact prescription for this question, but let’s try to lay some ground rules.
First, tweet more than once a day. At a minimum, 5 times a day, distributed to the morning, afternoon, and night. Many businesses forget to Tweet in the evening around 7pm-11pm when many Twitter users are still very active.
If your company engages journalists, marketers, writers, geeks, techies, politicians or developers (among other Twitter power user groups) it might actually be hard to tweet too much.
50 posts a day, or more would not be a bad test to run for those audiences. As long as your content is varied enough and interesting.
For some businesses, that number might be a shock.
But, between curated content, reposting your most important links 2-3 times a day or more, quotes, questions, hashtag engagement, charts, photos, and user generated content, there is plenty of opportunity here.
Use intelligent social media tools to help you curate and schedule this volume of content. Buffer is one such tool that could be a huge help here.
I am not asking you to post crap content so that you can fill more tweets. Be mindful and strategic.
But there is value in getting in front of your Twitter audience more than most businesses are doing.
A few quick takeaways:
  • Tweet 5 times a day minimum
  • Experiment with up to 50 tweets a day, especially if your followers are Twitter power users
  • Don’t make your content all links (unless you are a publisher)
  • Use the right tools to make this volume of content easier
  • Don’t post crap just to fill space

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