This week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving at our house and when there are several friends and family over we will be having multiple conversations going on simultaneously, sort of like Twitter.

Recently I was talking with a friend and among the various items we discussed was Tweeting and how much is enough vs. too much.

1st off, there is no 1 correct answer.

We have different opinions.

But it’s not just sending out tweets, it’s about conversations right?

Usually, but this Twitter thing has very few rules except the 140 character limit.

Because my background is in broadcasting I understand the concept of making sure your message is heard and just because you tweet something 1 time, all of your followers are not going to see it.

Why not?

Not everyone is looking at their Twitter stream when you send your tweet.  This could be because of the different things going on in each persons life, meetings, school, time of day, etc.

Then there is the variable factor of how many people others are following besides you, which could range from less than 10 to 100,000 or more.  But what’s even more significant is the number of tweets that are buzzing by… how fast that persons Twitter stream is flowing as to whether or not they get the message or announcement you want them to see.

 

You could mention them by their Twitter handle, but that can boarder on spammy if you do that to lots of people just to get their attention.

 

So I will take a different approach.

If there is an event or an item that I want to share and I want to give as many of my followers the opportunity to see the tweet, I will schedule repeats or variations of Tweets.

This was the area of disagreement that we were having.  And I don’t want you to take sides, because I also understand his argument against doing this and I don’t totally disagree.

But before I go any further, let me explain how I do this and why.

Let’s say there is an upcoming event that I want to invite people to attend that is a week away.  I will create a headline with a link for details on Twitter and post it say at 9am.  I will repeat it the next day at 4pm.  I might skip a day and post it a third time at noon, and the day after at 8pm.

Each time I post this announcement on Twitter, it is being read by both the same people and also different people because I know that all 3000 of my followers are not monitoring Twitter at each of those times.  They (we) have lives beyond twitter and so we have our times when we miss a lot of the Twitter talk.

My friend’s argument was that the folks who do hang out a lot on Twitter and perhaps see every tweet I send out, including those repeats are getting annoyed.  Maybe he is right.

So I look for proof which would be obvious if I saw a lot of people unfollowing me. But the number is usually pretty low.  Maybe they are not unfollowing me but simply choosing to ignore or place less value on the tweets I send out each day.  Or there is the third option and it’s what I do.

That third option is to monitor the folks I like to follow and take the good with the occasional bad.  I don’t hang on every word because I don’t always care what you have to say on Twitter, Facebook, any other social media channel and sometimes Face to Face.  But that doesn’t diminish the fact that I like you and want to hear some of what you have to share.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.