Are You Tweeting Too Much?

The first time you sign on to Twitter, you will be greeted by a question at the top of the screen which may seem impertinent. The line of text says, in full, “What Are You Doing?”. The literal answer to this may not be anything particularly interesting. Indeed, it may be “Logging on to Twitter”. It may go without saying, but this question need not be answered in full every time you read it. The more basic and banal your Twitter updates are, the less likely people are to follow you. That’s not to say that you can never post basic updates, but if you tell people every time you sneeze, they’re going to lose interest.

People follow Twitter these days by a wide and varied range of means, including via a feed client which posts new updates on their desktop at graduated intervals. If someone sees that they have twenty new tweets to read, and then discovers that fifteen of them are from you talking about how your toaster isn’t working, then they’d better be very funny updates on the toaster situation or you will lose followers. Quality is more important than quantity, or at least as important.

Of course, your tweeting style should reflect the audience you want to read your tweets. Not everybody is Oscar Wilde, and not everybody wants to read Oscar Wilde anyway. Your tweets should, when it comes down to it, reflect your personality more than anything, and if that personality is simple and unassuming, then your tweets don’t need to be about rescuing people from fires or performing at Carnegie Hall.