Day 1 Takeaways – Social Media Success Summit – #SMSS10
The opening day of the 2010 online Social Media Success Summit was a keynote address from Guy Kawasaki of alltop.com, entitled Using Twitter as a Marketing Weapon
I’ve published a post on Market it Write’s blog with the main takeaways of the session, but I’ll try to give you some insight and personal thoughts here.
Tweet Again?
One of the things that Kawasaki makes a regular Twitter practice that I hadn’t considered before was the he repeats the same tweet four times at eight-hour intervals. He gave the example of how TV news, like CNN, repeat their news stories on a loop, so that if you were to sit there and watch it continually over a two-hour period you’d hear the same news over and over again.
I can see where tweeting at different times of day could be an advantage – especially if you want your tweets to get noticed by Twitter users over different time zones. However, I also believe that if you have nothing but multiple identical tweets in a row, people may start ignoring you, or worse, consider you a spammer. Kawasaki puts out so many tweets per day that it still looks like there’s a mix. If you only tweet one item per day multiple times, I wouldn’t recommend following this suggestion.
When’s the Best Time to Tweet?
While morning seems to be the most active Twitter time for most, there are those who only participate in the early evening or late at night, too, so I can see the reasoning behind it. Keep in mind that not all of your followers live in the same time zone that you do.
What are your thoughts? Are repeated tweets spam in your book, or smart social media marketing strategy?
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Guy is in a league of his own. And his huge, worldwide and multiple time zone audience would support and appreciate his repeat-tweet strategy. It makes perfect sense **for his brand**.
Is this a strategy that would work for everyone though? If we were to classify Guy as “XLarge” in terms of online brand size/reach/following, then anyone in the Small – Medium size range would probably be well advised to use the repeat-tweet strategy intermittently, and with forethought (as opposed to having the firehose turned to the “I always” repeat-tweet setting) to balance being heard against becoming obnoxiously loud.
One size does not fit all in this case.
Mark:
Thanks for stopping by and for the great comment. I agree, one size does not fit all in social media as in much of life and certainly all of marketing.
I don’t agree with Kawasaki’s Twitter practise of repeating tweets several times a day. Its annoying and that’s one of the reason that i stopped following him.
Auto-tweeting is equally bad unless you are news publishers and has the need to keep pushing out information.
Peter:
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment. There are actually better ways to re-tweet than automatically sending the same on at pre-determined intervals. Using a tool like HootSuite, for example, you could re-word the same tweet and schedule it to go out whenever. The other issue is that when people look at your stream of tweets, if you’ve only done one tweet four times and nothing in between it will be very obvious what you’re trying to do.
Having your blog set up to tweet each post automatically is not a bad thing as it saves some time. But you’d want to tweet other things too and send tweets that are a bit more than a title and a link. Maybe tweet the new post again with different or additional text the following week or a few days later at a different time of day.
Randy