Should you Retweet yourself?
I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you meet someone for the first time and are transfixed by the exciting and interesting stories they’re telling.
If you’re lucky, they may turn out to be the Michael Palin of story tellers and have a never ending supply of interesting tales and adventures. In reality, the person may only have a handful of interesting stories to share and you will soon realise that you’re hearing them regurgitate the same set of yarns time and again.
This may be a problem in a small social circle, but does it matter if your audience is mobile with a short attention span? In fact, can it actually be beneficial to repeat your best stories?
To put things into perspective: I’m currently following a meagre 56 people on Twitter and yet in the past hour I’ve been notified of over 50 new Tweets, of which I’ve probably read about 3. With some people following hundreds of others, there is no guarantee that they’ve received a Tweet, let alone read it (no matter how important or useful the original Tweeter may think it is!).
This poses an obvious dilemma of how to you reach your following if a large percentage of them will never see your Tweet.
In the past couple of weeks I’ve been programming a simple Twitter analytics program which analyses a Twitter account and the messages that are being sent from it. I randomly selected some Twitter accounts for testing purposes and I discovered an interesting trait in one of the more successful ones: they were constantly repeating themselves on Twitter.
In one instance, @Openzine had tweeted the same message 131 times over a period of 4 weeks which had resulted in constant exposure and 222 retweets of the message (and the link to their website). These tweets were sent at varying times of the day which increased the likelihood that different demographics of their followers would see the message (and decreased the likelihood of people seeing it twice).
Retweeting yourself gives you the opportunity to ensure maximum exposure for your most important messages or content, and if carefully planned and tracked, it won’t have a negative impact on the number of followers you have.
To get you started, here are some rules for retweeting yourself:
- Understand your followers – discover where they are located so you can see which times would be best for tweeting (and retweeting) –there is an interesting Yahoo Pipes mash-up which does this
- Don’t overdo it – a maximum of 4 retweets per day depending on your follower demographic
- Automate your retweets using services such as Easy Tweets or Twuffer (free)
- Monitor people who stop following you – if you find that retweeting a message is causing followers to drop off, adapt your retweeting campaign to fit (Qwitter is a handy tool for this)
- Write interesting tweets between retweets – you don’t want people to look at your profile and see a long list of tweets with the same content
- Only retweet useful and relevant content
- Mix it up a bit – keep the message fresh by giving it a new twist every couple of days
- Keep retweeting for as long as the message is relevant
All in all, use a bit of common sense and you can’t go wrong (famous last words).
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Blane Warrene
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mj7
