Should you share a tweet multiple times on Twitter?
The vast majority of items I share on Twitter I share only once. I don’t repeat tweets.
One exception I’ve been making of late is tweeting to hit time zones in the case of sharing my blog posts on Twitter. I often blog in the late evening, Pacific Time. Rather than wait until the morning to share my post on Twitter, I share it that night.
Invariably, I see followers from the UK, Germany, Spain, Australia and around the world retweet my post. And why not, it’s the next day for them.
I am now starting to re-think my practice of not sharing tweets multiple times all together.
First, the items I am sharing on Twitter are mostly items written by and news about others. My tweets are about twenty to one other’s content versus my own. So if I do share multiple times I am tooting the horn of others, not just my own – so to speak.
Second, when you share an item on Twitter, you’re likely to reach about 5% of your followers. This per Leo Widrich (@leowid), co-founder of Buffer, a widely used web application that schedules and buffers items shared on social media.
On social media you need to go where your audience and network is located. On Twitter, people look at their feed sparingly, if at all. If you’re going to reach them, you may need to Tweet more than once. Heck, maybe it’s the polite thing to do.
Guy Kawaski, in his new book on the Art of Social Media with Peg Fitzpatrick, preaches multiple tweeting eight hours apart. He strongly advises that it’s worth having six times more clicks on a single tweet and risk the slight chance a few will unfollow you.
Third, the world is indeed a big place. I have followers all around the globe. LexBlog’s business is organically expanding world-wide. Having a law blog to establish yourself as a go-to lawyer is not a uniquely American phenomenon. I ought to build relationships and a name globally.
Finally, there are tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck that can help me do the job. I’ll use Buffer because it allows me to schedule my tweets, re-share tweets and see which tweets perform best.
To start with I am likely to re-share those tweets which have gotten clicked on and re-tweeted the most. Rather than three times every twenty four hours, I’ll go for once every twelve hours. Maybe early morning and then again in the evening.
What should you do? I’d suggest trying multiple tweeting — so long as you make it a practice to share valuable items of others. Value being measured not by whether a tweet gives you ‘mind share’ with your followers, but whether it adds value to the life of your followers.
Lastly, here’s a brief video from Buffer on the science of why it makes sense to share multiple times on social media.
Though Leo discusses other social media, I’d limit my thinking to Twitter for now. The law is unlike building a brand for ice cream through social media.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Alvaro L. Paris