I used to think it was bad form to repeat my tweets about blog posts or other information I wanted to get out to the twitterverse. But Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says it’s okay to repeat your tweet — if you want to drive more traffic to your blog, website or whatever you’re linking to.
Kawasaki tested this theory that repeat tweets bring more traffic, and whaddyaknow, it works! For Guy Kawasaki, anyway. (More on that later.)
In his first experiment, Kawasaki repeated a single tweet four times, eight hours apart. Although the original tweet brought more traffic than the others, “the next three still yielded very good results.”
In his next experiment, he tweeted a post with link daily for nine consecutive days, with results similar to the first experiment.
Let’s assume that I had listened to the dogma and tweet either of these just once. (This would be based on the delusion that every follower of mine read every tweet every day, so repetition is unnecessary if not impolite.) This assumption would have cost me 3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs.
To which I can only say:
3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs!? zOMG.
There’s a reason he’s Guy Kawasaki and I’m not.
But, maybe his theory holds water for those of us who have Twitter presences followed by fewer than the 164,000-plus in Kawasaki’s posse. I get the feeling that too many repeated tweets, too close together, would lead to a drop in followership.
Still, it’s not always about the numbers of followers. It’s about quality, right?
Andrew Careaga 