Is 22 Tweets-Per-Day the Optimum? A Twittercurmudgeon mumbles.

OK, here's a disclaimer: This is completely personal. It's not intended as a best practice for building your business or landing good PR or anything like that.

I refer to this post on a good inbound marketing blog (Hubspot). "Ever wonder how often you should be tweeting? How much is too much..."

They ran some analytics to come up with...
- average # of Twitter postings per user (~4.4)
- average # of followers per Twitterer (~103)
- average # of Twitter postings for the 50 MOST FOLLOWED Twitterers (~22!)

Regarding this third statistic, they raise this excellent question:

"Is this correlation or causation? for example - is it that the most interesting people just happen to tweet at that frequency, or is it that this is the "goldilocks" number - not too frequent, not too seldom - to be most productive at attracting followers? Or some other phenomenon?"

Here is my humble, yet accurate opinion.

When you're in the top 50, then a huge number of people perceive your content brand to have celebrity cachet, information value, or (most likely - just see who's in the top 50) both.

When you've got that kind of influence, the demand for your content is higher than for that of most Twitterers.

For those of you who are not in the top 50 and do not have that kind of brand power, here's my personal, and admittedly somewhat curmudgeonly rationale for why you should NOT tweet 22 times per day:

- You're drowning out all the other people from whom I want to hear, who only say 1-2 things per day (or less). But those things are interesting, insightful, informative, witty, of human interest, or otherwise valued.

- From how many people can I reasonably absorb a daily ~500 word essay in 140 character episodes? Here's the math. Say I follow 100 people. Each of them tweets only 10x/day. That's roughly 20,000 words per DAY. I'm reading this on my smartphone, people. Do you think this is even possible?

- Very, very, very few people have 22 fascinating, informative, insightful, witty, valuable things to tell the rest of us each day. (And many such thoughts are restricted by contractual agreements, space limitations, and/or personal taste.)

- Even if some Tweeple make it a full time job to crank out interesting things to say, do I need to make it my full time job to watch for and consume these sayings?

I assure you, as a follower of a few folks on Twitter, that if any of you good Tweeple on my list start Twittering 22x/day... I will put you on mute. And if you keep it up, I'll unfollow you.

Hopefully I'll find some tools for swimming deeper in the social media river without drowning. (Your suggestions are welcome!) Meantime, I'm looking for low volume, high value Tweeters. I follow very few Tweeple who routinely average more than 4 posts/day on Twitter.

Having said all that, I hope to see and hear from you on Twitter!