Here’s How I’m Doing a Better Job Getting My Followers To Read My Tweets

One of the hardest things about communicating on the Web is trying to both be effective (and affective!) and not annoy people taking the time interact with your content. If someone is interested enough to read your blog posts or tweets, watch your video, or listen to your podcasts, you shouldn’t annoy them. Corporations and their marketing messages already bother people too much; you don’t want your communication lumped into the pile of corporate spam.

So, here’s what you can accomplish by repeating some  tweets and how to prevent your readers from being annoyed.

As your list of followers grows, especially beyond people you actually know, I think it’s safe to assume that people won’t read every one of your tweets. People’s Twittering habits are highly variable, but one thing is safe to assume: tweet reading is not comprehensive. You’ll never get all your tweets read by all your followers, but you can increase readership by repeating a tweet a few hours apart.

By repeating a tweet in the morning then the next day evening, you’re likely to catch people with different tweet consumption habits. For the obsesive folks monitoring their streams 24/7, repeating tweets aren’t likely to surprise those folks. Of course, you can only repeat tweets that aren’t time sensitive.

It probably isn’t necessary to repeat every tweet; not everything you write has the same value, therefore why potentailly make a nusance of yourself? Recently I repeated a tweet that caused a negative response, pointing out a problem: I probably repeated a tweet not worth the effort. Here’s the tweet I repeated:

Probably telling you something you already know, but the best wood fired oven bread in #westernma is Hungry Ghost Bread http://ow.ly/Pmdh

I may be very passionate about this bread and the bakery, but by repeating  the tweet multiple times, it made me seem like a shill, even though I wasn’t getting paid for the promotion.

Balance your own enthusiasm with what your followers will be interested in, because even though most people won’t read all your tweets, you don’t want to continuously annoy people that are interested in everything you write. Balance!

What kinds of tweets would you repeat?