How Many Tweets Are Too Many Tweets?

Becoming a follower of a major corporation on Twitter is a cross between eavesdropping on a personal conversation full of inside jokes and signing up for a continuous stream of online advertising. I still haven’t figured out if I’m actually following the real companies, but whoever I’m following is on Twitter all of the time – especially macTweeter.

From 5:20 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on April 24, I received nine tweets from macTweeter. Most tweets were messages about Apple products or Apple-related news (like the following tweet from 5:21 a.m. – “The App Store hits one billion downloads! http://tinyurl.com/dknnjh”). I understand the business purpose of these tweets, and some of them are actually kind of interesting – more like a news feed about Apple rather than a collection of posts disguised as advertising. I was especially surprised to see this tweet: “Baby Shaker App Fiasco Underscores Need for Change from Apple http://tinyurl.com/c9ste7.” I couldn’t believe the company would post something that was negative about one of their products.

Corporate Twitter Lesson #1: What’s More Important – Quantity or Quality?

Even though I find most of the posts from macTweeter to be interesting, nine tweets is excessive. Are there really nine news-worthy items in any given day that a company should tweet about? As I was thinking about this, I ran across an article on Ragan.com, “Are five tweets a day too much?” by Jonathan Kranz.

Kranz has issued “a call to action to stop following tweeters who exceed five posts a day.” By limiting the number of tweets to five a day, Kranz believes the focus would shift from quantity of tweets to quality. It would “discourage empty chatter,” writes Kranz, and ultimately “it would save Twitter from itself. If participants fail to voluntarily limit themselves, readers – as a matter of self-defense – will abandon the platform.” I completely agree. The amount of tweets I receive in a day from companies like Best Buy and Apple, not to mention the “real people” I’m following, are astronomical. I have to scroll through at least three full pages to read all of the tweets in a given day. And I'm only following 10 people.

Why to Limit Your Tweets

I’m sure some will say the call to limit your tweets goes against the nature of Twitter’s instantaneous exchange of information. But with a focus on quality versus quantity, the dialogue on Twitter will inevitably become richer and more substantive. And by limiting posts to five or less a day, I’ll actually be able to read (or at least scan) the posts each day.

Are you ready to the take the pledge? As Kranz says, “Five tweets are sweet, six are nix.”