This is my third case study about tweeting at a greater frequency. A very long time ago in a galaxy farther away than the Death Star, I tweeted once every hour and got a few blog visitors. Then, when I doubled my tweeting frequency to 30 minutes every day, I got double the number of visitors. After that, I decided to send out one tweet every 20 minutes and got more visitors.
Then, I decided to send out one tweet every 15 minutes, and as I expected, it has produced the best results out of all of the tweeting frequencies.
When I tweeted once every 20 minutes, over 300 visitors got referred by Twitter every day. Before going from tweeting every 20 minutes to tweeting every 15 minutes, I guessed that my traffic from Twitter would increase by 50-100 daily visitors and just miss 400 daily visitors from Twitter.
I ended up getting 454 visitors from Twitter on the first day I implemented the change. This was a 51% growth of Twitter traffic in just one day. In one month, that’s an extra 4,500 visitors and over 50,000 extra visitors every year! The best part is that since my Twitter audience continues to grow, I will continue to see gradual increases in traffic.
There is great potential in tweeting more often. However, I see tweeting once every 15 minutes as the fork in the road. The amount of people who unfollow my account on a daily basis slightly increased after I made the change. In the end, I always gain more followers than there are people who unfollow me (I almost always have a net gain of over 300 followers per day).
Tweeting frequently is definitely worth it because it results in more blog traffic. The two goals of my Twitter account are to interact with my audience and lead people to my blog. Tweeting more frequently makes those three goals happen more often. That’s why losing a few more followers per day does not bother me, especially when I gain more than I lose.
When I started this journey and created the case studies, one of my biggest fears was that I would annoy my followers with too many updates. A common practice on Twitter is to avoid sending so many updates in a short period of time (i.e. Sending out 10 tweets in two minutes, which is still something to avoid). Each time I increased the consistency and frequency of my tweets, my followers were still sharing the tweets and engaging with me more than usual.
Since I was tweeting more often, they were seeing me more often.
What are your thoughts on this Twitter case study? How frequently do you tweet? Please share your thoughts below.
I tweet quite a lot. I can tweet or retweet super fast many of tweets in less than five minutes. I think the problem is I tweet too many too fast and should space out my tweets more. It’s just so hard when there are so many great things to tweet and so many great tweets come to mind.
You can schedule tweets in advance to space them out better. Try writing your tweets in HootSuite’s dashboard. That way you’ll have the option right there to schedule each tweet
What a really interesting case study ??. Quick question – were your tweets all different/individually written/about a particular subject?? Thanks in advance for any tips you can offer, and ???Happy Holiday???!!
I have an evergreen tweeting cycle in place with a few hundred tweets in it. That’s because not everyone reads my tweets the 1st, 2nd, or 100th time. Also, anyone who follows me today has never read any of my tweets beforehand with the exception of the first ones that are on my feed.
Thank you for the great advice on scheduling using Hootsuite. I’m a volunteer Twitter manager for a non-profit. More frequent Tweets using Hootsuite to automate the distribution and scheduling will make my volunteer time go a lot farther.
I’m happy you benefitted from this article Neil. I wish you the best of luck managing the non-profit’s Twitter.
[ Smiles ] Yes, I too have noticed that Tweeting frequently will help in the area of attracting visitors to my blog and of course, an increased number of Twitter followers.
Splendid article!
Thank you Renard. I am happy to hear that you enjoyed the article.
Marc, I’m curious: when you were tweeting at this high frequency (15mins), were you tweeting out links to your own content alone or were you also mixing in curated content from other blogs/websites? And if you were mixing in curated content, what was the ratio of curated vs. original (ie your) content?
Also, how many followers did your account have during this experiment (ballpark)?
I would be better able to adjust your results to my circumstances with that information.
Thanks a lot.
For the most part, I tweet my own content because it’s evergreen and people engage with it. That way, I know people are getting value from it. I don’t remember how many followers I had specifically. I’d guess a little under 10,000 but don’t remember.
Hi Marc, Great news on getting a higher visit rate to your blog. However, what happened to your churn rate? Did people stay and read your blog, or just click away? There’s a marked difference between visitors and valuable visitors.
Great question Kevin. My bounce rate did not change much when I changed my tweeting frequency. Once people get on your blog, it’s the blog’s job to keep people there. Twitter did its job (for that particular task anyway) when it brought someone to your blog.
It makes sense when you hear a tweet has a lifespan of 18 mins.
I agree. Hearing the length of a tweet’s lifespan motivated me to give this case study a try.
Hello Marc. This might be a good strategy if you have something specific to you want to campaign such as a webinar. I would be interested in knowing this strategy can increase sign ups for your free offers
I use this strategy to get a bulk of my subscribers. It works for getting more blog traffic, subscribers, and sales.
Thanks for being so honest with us.
My pleasure AJ.
Hi Marc,
Thank you for the case study.I never thought before on scheduling the bulk info before upload or retweet the message. A good lesson today and giving the valuable information based on your schedule timeline per day maybe quite hard for me.however, there’s always a room to improvise. Right?…thank you again
My pleasure Azza. And yes, there is always time to improvise. Even though I have a set tweeting cycle, I look at my tweets to see which tweets I send get the best/worst results. I continue tweeting the tweets that get the best results and stop tweeting the tweets that get the worst results. It’s just like survival of the fittest but with my tweets.
Marc, I have been tweeting every 15 minutes for 6 weeks now. My visits have tripled to my site. still less than 100 per day, but it is slowly growing. Thanks for your help. I also use Hootsuite Pro as you suggested and I take every hour and put on facebook, linkedin and google plus. I do video blogs (also your suggestion) as well as written posts and now google is sending people to my site everyday. It seems like perseverance is important to keep that focus and go with it.
Perseverance is the quality that turns a person into a success. I am happy to hear that tweeting more frequently is getting you more blog traffic. Just keep growing your Twitter audience and implementing the methods, and soon enough you’ll be getting well over 100 visitors per day.
Hi Marc, Justin here, just launced a UK Marketplace website, last Thursday in face, 100k products and growing. Feel like I’m repeating myself too much on Twitter and not getting anywhere… I have 462 followers, but I thought that once we went live we’d get more. Hits on the site went through the roof, which produced sales (good), but now.. seems like not getting anywhere.. any thoughts?
The way you use Twitter determines your success. Focus on building a targeted audience by following the right people and engaging with your audience. While automation is a start, it will never replace the vital interaction.
Awesome Marc, just a question. If u have less followers, still tweeting so frequently works to increase ur follower audience??
It still works because your current followers get to see you more often which means more engagement. If you use hashtags, it will also be easier for potential followers to find you in Twitter’s search engine.
Hi Marc. Very good idea, I´ll try it. Thanks for it!
My pleasure Miriam.
I think as long as you tweet relevant and informative information, you should always have a positive gain. The followers have to dial down on what’s important to them too in order to avoid receiving tweets that have no real meaning to them.
The tweet value is what makes or breaks someone’s Twitter audience. All of the tweets we post should be valuable. That way, more people will be inclined to follow us, and more of those followers will engage with our content.
I’ve read quite a few of your articles now, and you really know what you’re doing. I learn so much in every one of them. Thank you!
My pleasure Donna. Thank you for taking the time to read them 🙂
Good Job. Makes total sense. I think you touched on several people’s concerns about “overtweeting”.
Thank you. I believe over tweeting is one of the main reasons people don’t schedule this many tweets in a given day, but it’s not as annoying as many people make it out to be (if done properly). I could send 100 tweets in an hour. That would be annoying. However, I space them throughout a given day which does not make it annoying. Many of my followers have thanked me for constantly tweeting about my articles (people will only thank you if you tweet valuable content).
Marc,
Thanks for the breakdown. Your 30 min case study helped me get over the fear of tweeting too much. I’m not at your volume yet. May never be. But thanks for sharing your results.
My pleasure Eric. I am happy to hear that you like the results. Tweeting every 15 minutes is not nearly as hard as it sounds. I use HootSuite Pro’s bulk scheduler and then I can schedule over 100 tweets in just 6 clicks.
Why did you choose Hootsuite, versus BufferApp Bulk Upload?
I’m trying to figure out which system works for me. I’ve been trying Buffer, and I’m mildly happy. What’s your secret to getting all those posts uploaded somewhere, and then scheduling them?
And also, at what point do you interact with Twitter? You tweet every 15 minutes, but when do you scroll through and read and click?
Cheers!
(PS. I think it’s AMAZING!!!! that I am consulting with a 17 year old EXPERT in the subject! Do you know how many years of school it took me to become an expert in my field? (hint, more than you’ve been alive) The internet is making the playing field unlimited, and that rocks!!!)
I haven’t tried the BufferApp Bulk Upload and I’m very comfortable with HootSuite Pro so I’ll just stick with it. HootSuite was ranked as the #1 Social Media Tool in 2014. All of the posts are prewritten in a CSV file and then I schedule them in the bulk scheduler. I can schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks. I interact on Twitter in the morning before I go to school and when I get home from school. I sometimes look at the trending topics to catch up with the news, but I’m rarely looking at the trending topics for more than 10 minutes. I agree that the web has given teens like myself an amazing possibility and my mission is to make more teens join us on the web and become successful.
Now this is useful. I recently set up campaign for a local radio station that tweeted the same message every 15 minutes, because that’s when they were making on air announcements, and they got the same results. Big spike in traffic and giant leap in followers. Thank you for this case study. I can definitely use this to support future strategic campaigns.
My pleasure Jermaine. I believe more people need to schedule tweets in bulk. I use HootSuite Pro to schedule my tweets, and it has really paid off. I save about 10 hours every week because I am able to schedule over 100 tweets in six clicks instead of a few hours.
Thank you, very much Great Information
My pleasure Harshad. I am happy to hear that you enjoyed the article.