How Many Times Should You Tweet Your Blog Post?

I think it all comes down to how many times you tweet someone else's stuff, Aaron.

If you make sure to mostly tweet other great resources, not belonging to you, then I usually tweet my own stuff several times per day.

I totally agree with the four tweet theory about every 8 hours. The comment on tweets dying after an hour or so is absolutely true. I check twitter multiple time throughout the day and sometimes I have hundreds of new tweets. Couldn't possibly scroll through them all. Plus the time zone piece is key. When I get up in the morning, I often have several dozen hits on my blogs from Europe and Asia. I would recommend treating those time zones as a completely different schedule. If you tweet again at say 3am and 5am, you'll be reaching the European and Asian readers, whiel any US followers will be still in bed.

Great Post!

Hi, I am new to twitter and blogging and have gotten most of my followers from twitter. I have been wondering if I was "spamming" by posting and reposting my blog articles. This information is very helpful to me. Love all the ideas in the comments . I think I am doing things correctly. One thing that has not been answered - if I retweet my post several times with different titles - won't some people get irritated because they click on it and see the same post when they thought it might be different? I guess that won't happen much at all anyway.

I will definitely start spreading my tweets out more to take advantage of timezones and work schedules. And I am signed up for HootSuite but don't know how to use it. I'll have to learn, scheduling the tweets will be very helpful.

What about reposting old articles? I have several articles that have not been read much and would love to recycle these, I think this is helpful when I am slow on writing more posts and still want to keep my blog fresh in people's minds. But will people be annoyed by this?

As with everything else, this really depends. You run a good chance of annoying your best fans if they always see the same tweet from you multiple times for every post. I would suggest a different strategy. How about tweet once or twice, but then share at a different time and re-share to a different site at a different time. Each of those actions will likely generate more tweets, so you'll get coverage that way without looking like you're trying to push something too hard.

You should also consider reserving the bigger pushes for your better posts. Your readers will appreciate having that signal available to them as well.

There is no reason to tweet a blog post more than once. I read my followees' tweets when I want to read them. I have decided which ones are important to me and have those texted to me. I also have lists that further allow me to read tweets when I want. I use saved searches based on keywords. My point is that there are many tools available that allow us readers to decide what we want to read and when; thereby limiting the possibility of missing what's important. Such sophisticated tools are not available for TV, so such a comparison is not valid.

I totally agree with the four tweet theory about every 8 hours. The comment on tweets dying after an hour or so is absolutely true. I check twitter multiple time throughout the day and sometimes I have hundreds of new tweets. Couldn't possibly scroll through them all. Plus the time zone piece is key. When I get up in the morning, I often have several dozen hits on my blogs from Europe and Asia. I would recommend treating those time zones as a completely different schedule. If you tweet again at say 3am and 5am, you'll be reaching the European and Asian readers, whiel any US followers will be still in bed.

Great Post!

I used to tweet my posts manually a couple of times but have recently started to use su.pr to schedule tweets and it's been most helpful. After cooking a meal, photographing the dish and then writing a post, I certainly hope to get a decent audience for the effort and once was not enough. I'm doing three times a day for 2 days...and thinking of a 'in cased you missed it' tweet on the third day! I tweet a lot and that includes RTing a lot of others so I don't worry too much about whether this repetition will annoy someone; chances are for all the reasons you mention that few will see it more than once or twice.

Here's my take on these points, Catherine. When retweeting my blog posts I change the title a little so that Twitter won't reject it as a duplicate, but not so much that people will think it's a different post. All you have to do is change a bit of punctuation, for example, maybe inserting or removing a colon before the URL.

On your second point, I occasionally RT old posts that I think are still of interest. I usually put [archive post] at the end of the tweet, although I don't suppose that's really necessary. I've never had anyone complain about this - on the contrary, I've had planty of extra RTs and messages of thanks.

Hi, I am new to twitter and blogging and have gotten most of my followers from twitter. I have been wondering if I was "spamming" by posting and reposting my blog articles. This information is very helpful to me. Love all the ideas in the comments . I think I am doing things correctly. One thing that has not been answered - if I retweet my post several times with different titles - won't some people get irritated because they click on it and see the same post when they thought it might be different? I guess that won't happen much at all anyway.

I will definitely start spreading my tweets out more to take advantage of timezones and work schedules. And I am signed up for HootSuite but don't know how to use it. I'll have to learn, scheduling the tweets will be very helpful.

What about reposting old articles? I have several articles that have not been read much and would love to recycle these, I think this is helpful when I am slow on writing more posts and still want to keep my blog fresh in people's minds. But will people be annoyed by this?

As with everything else, this really depends. You run a good chance of annoying your best fans if they always see the same tweet from you multiple times for every post. I would suggest a different strategy. How about tweet once or twice, but then share at a different time and re-share to a different site at a different time. Each of those actions will likely generate more tweets, so you'll get coverage that way without looking like you're trying to push something too hard.

You should also consider reserving the bigger pushes for your better posts. Your readers will appreciate having that signal available to them as well.

I'm on your side here Aaron.
I post all of my personal and Sysomos' blog posts a minimum of three times each. And I do it because of all the reasons you listed above; timezones, people being around and the fear of just getting lost in the tweets.

I think that this formula works and makes sense, despite some people who complain about it. I think it makes even more sense for companies that want people world-wide to see their content. For instance, I tweet first at 8am EST. Already people on the west coast of North America miss it because it's only 5am for them, not to mention people on the other side of the world.

It just makes sense to post a link more than once... unless you know that your entire audience is online in front of Twitter always at the same time.

Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos

Early on in my Twitter days, when I began blogging daily, I fought this. I didn't want to be seen as someone who promoted their blog all the time. My fix? I tweet the blog four times each day. And I tweet someone else's content eight times every day. It's the 80/20 rule - 80 percent about others and 20 percent about me.

Aaron,

I know for myself I tweet out my blog post about 5 plus times a year because their are so many different people out their in the Twitter universe that you can not reach everyone just in two or three tweets. Some people work,school, and family functions it would be really hard to reach those people if you limit yourself to just a small amount of tweets. If you do expand out your tweets it would benefit you the most because you don't know when someone would learn something from that specific post you are writing about. Thanks for sharing this information.

Great post. This is actually a strong argument for using a Twitter client such as HootSuite, which allows you to schedule posts in advance (e.g. when you're asleep).

It's worth pointing out, though, that you need to vary the wording of your tweets, as Twitter will not allow the exact same message to be sent out multiple times.

Thank you so much for your thoughts on tweeting blog updates... this is something I've wondered about for a while. I've always worried that if I reposted them too often, I would annoy followers... because as a follower of others, I've been frustrated by people who re-post the same things over and over. However, your idea of breaking the posts up into 2 days, 12 hours apart seems like it should work very well. Thanks for your thoughts! :)

I have to completely agree with this, I actually Retweet it 3 times a day when I have a new post on my blog, but 4 times with 8 hours spread sounds more logical and I think I will adapt my scheduling to this the next time I try.
All those reasons are good, it's a mix of causes that make any Tweet die within the hour and it's nothing we can really avoid. For the same reason, I doubt anyone will really complain about you Retweeting your stuff 4 times, unless it's the only thing you do during the day, every day.

Hey Aaron,

I agree 100%. I write 2 blog posts a week on Tuesday and Thursday. I publish and tweet first at 9am and again 12 hours later for 2 days. I also throw a tweet out there once on Saturday and once on Sunday. I do try to change the tweets a little bit and even test different lead ins like "my latest post..." or "check out my blog on..."

Thanks for sharing this and confirming my approach.

Best,@brennermichael
Michael Brenner

Hey Aaron,

I agree 100%. I write 2 blog posts a week on Tuesday and Thursday. I publish and tweet first at 9am and again 12 hours later for 2 days. I also throw a tweet out there once on Saturday and once on Sunday. I do try to change the tweets a little but and even test different lead ins like "my latest post..." or "check out my blog on..."

Thanks for sharing this and confirming my approach.

Best,@brennermichael
Michael Brenner

I suspected 4 times was about the right number.

But occasionally a topic will come up and get passed around that relates to an old post of mine.

This always prompts me to tweet it again to piggyback on the existing chatter.

So, yep, 4 sounds fair with the odd extra push every now and then, I reckon.

Gotta run...It's St Paddy's Day, and that reminds me of a recent post that deserves another airing.

Great information. What do you recommend for a newbie blogger and Twitter user?

Thank you so much Aaron for sharing.
Great stuff over ;)