My Twitter Quantity Experiment

I follow some very successful Twitter users and noticed they tweeted a lot, which inspired me to try the experiment I’ll outline in this post.

For several weeks, I tweeted the same type of content I always have — just more often. On average, I tweet about once an hour, for seven to ten hours each week day. I noticed that the active, high quality Twitter users that I follow tend to tweet at least three times per hour, so I decided to emulate their process and also tweet two or three times per hour.

The result? I saw no noticeable change in the number of mentions, @replies or retweets (RT) of my posts during and after the experiment. I normally receive an average of five to eight mentions per day and that’s how much I saw during the experiment, too, even when I doubled or tripled my tweets.

Since the experiment, I’ve returned to my pre-experiment tweet average. Since upping my tweet quantity didn’t appear to have any value, there’s no reason to bombard my followers with more tweets.

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I asked people on Twitter why they thought the experiment hadn’t made an impact. Many people responded that it’s the quality of posts, rather than the quantity, that makes all the  difference, and there were also some responses that suggested I should have also tried changing when I posted, rather than sticking to my usual schedule.

For me, this provides some evidence that quantity doesn’t matter much in social media, although I still don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast rules.

Have you tried a similar experiment? Did you get different results?

Chart courtesy Twitter, reproduced with permission.

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