Posted by on Feb 17, 2012 in Marketing, Social Media | 3 comments

How Much Is Too Much Self-Promotion?

Recently, Amber Recker asked an interesting question on Twitter:

It was a question that’s been on my mind lately as I’ve seen more and more people promote their blog posts multiple times a day for a week or more after its initial publication on Twitter and Facebook, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn. The theory behind these multiple updates is simple: because people use social networks at different times, repeating the link increases the size of your potential audience. After all, you wouldn’t want anyone to miss your words of wisdom, right?

The poster child for the repeated tweet strategy is Guy Kawasaki. His popular Twitter account tweets the same links up to four times in a 24-hour period. He doesn’t change the language of the tweet, just varies the time. Why? Because it works. Kawasaki gives the example of tweeting the same link at 3:00 a.m., 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Respectively, the tweets received 739 clicks, 718 clicks and 565 clicks. To take it from the horse’s mouth:

If I follow common wisdom, I would have tweeted it once and lost 1,200 clicks—that’s the bottom line.

I tend to be a proponent of that “common wisdom” Kawasaki mentions. Usually, I tweet once and if it’s good, I know the content will rise. If not, that’s okay–not every blog post is a superstar. But I was curious, so I conducted a very small, very non-scientific experiment of my own. I tweeted a link to the same blog post four times in a 24-hour period. Now, I couldn’t bring myself to tweet the exact same content each time, so here’s what I shared:

How do you deal with anger online? When do you respond, when do you walk away? ow.ly/8L5tH

Can you ever really “win” an argument online? Is there any point? ow.ly/8LKXP

Fact: The Internet is filled with jerks. How do you deal with them? ow.ly/8LL1I

Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em with online arguments: ow.ly/8LL6A

And the results? 19 clicks, 6 clicks, 6 clicks and 5 clicks. Hey, I’m not Guy Kawasaki, but I doubled my effective traffic by repeating the tweet. I’m not sure the results would have been at all the same if I had repeated the same message verbatim. I think varying the content is critical to not angering those who have already seen the tweet, while keeping things fresh and interesting for those who haven’t seen it. Will I do this for every link I share? Probably not. But when you have something important or great to share, experiment a little with repeating tweets, and let us know what happens.

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  • robbyslaughter

    I like to send the same tweet three times: today, tomorrow and the day after.

    Each time I write it differently, just like Allison suggested.

    I also add it into the “from the archives” rotation so it appears once a quarter.

    Personally, I feel annoyed when a rewriting of the same tweet that I’ve seen before makes me think it’s different. Then when I click again, I am annoyed that I wasted my time and am not actually seeing new content.

    Thanks for writing this post!

  • Lorraine

    Robby did I read you comment correctly? You write they tweet differently multiple time, but you get annoyed when others do that and it makes you think it is different?

  • http://watershedstudio.com/ Brian Groce

    I don’t tend to repeat a whole lot on Facebook, maybe a few times a week if I really want to promote something. But those reasons could be an ebook by themselves.

    On Twitter I repeat the same thing 3-4 times a day if it’s something I really want to promote. My thinking being that those who are following a lot of accounts might miss it if it’s not repeated, but I also want to try to not annoy those who are only following a handful of accounts.

    As far as the wording goes, I do switch it up a bit, but that’s mainly because you can’t schedule the exact same tweet via Hootsuite.

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