I Tweeted Every 30 Minutes for a Week. Here’s What Happened

Tweeting frequency has always been something that interested me. There are a lot of studies out there saying you should Tweet X amount of times per day for the most engagement, or other "best practices." 

For example, this study from Social Bakers in 2014 showed that engagement drops after the third Tweet.

But when you look at some extremely popular accounts, you notice they Tweet super frequently, with no signs of annoying their followers.

Guy Kawasaki Tweets every five minutes, and he gets at least a couple Likes and Retweets on each one, which is good for Twitter.

And Sam Hurley sends Tweets almost every minute, and it doesn't seem to affect his engagement one bit.

So that led me to question whether or not the whole Tweeting too often rule was a myth. Well I actually already knew that Tweeting too much wasn't an issue, but I still wanted to test it out.

So I decided to run a little test where I would Tweet every thirty minutes for an entire week and see if it would help grow one of my Twitter accounts.

I can't give you the actual account because I'm using it for another project (be on the lookout for something pretty cool before the end of this year). But I can share the results of what happened.

To give you a little background, this is basically a brand new Twitter account for a new site, that I've been Tweeting from pretty consistently. But it's far from established. I was sending about five Tweets a day before running this experiment. 

I didn't go quite as far as Sam or Guy and Tweet every few minutes. But Tweeting every 30 minutes is far more frequently than most people so I figured it'd be a good testing point.​

What I Tweeted

The Tweets consisted of links to blog posts within the niche of the site the Twitter Handle is for.

I made a list of over 500 blogs in the niche, and put them all in a spreadsheet. Then I hired someone from Upwork to go through each site and find the main Twitter Handle. I wanted to be able to @mention the sites with each Tweet.

So the Tweets were the latest blog post from each site. I did one Tweet per blog, so I didn't get to everyone in the list.

The Tweets all followed the same format:​

I kept it simple and straightforward, no hashtags. It would've been interesting to see the impact adding hashtags would've had, but maybe some other time.

How I Actually Tweeted Every 30 Minutes

Obviously I wasn't going to manually send out a Tweet every 30 minutes. So instead I scheduled them. Scheduling 48 Tweets a day for 7 days is super time consuming. So I ended up outsourcing that to a VA through Upwork too. ​

I just had to give her the list of sites and Twitter handles, and step-by-step instructions and she took over from there. ​

The Results

​I wish I could say the results were mind blowing, but the numbers weren't anything spectacular. There was a really nice benefit that came from this, but I'll go over that in a bit.

First, let's look at my follower growth.

​I netted almost 30 new followers.

Despite sending over 300 Tweets, I only received 13 mentions. Just goes to show some people are straight up ignoring mentions of their blogs/brands on Twitter.

As for engagement, the top response I got was Likes. Very few users replied or even Retweeted me when I mentioned them.

So again, nothing super mind-blowing here. 

The Value of Tweeting A Lot

When you look at the numbers, the value of Tweeting more frequently doesn't seem worth it. But the real value you get is the potential connections. 

Although most of the people I mentioned didn't reply, the ones that did are now new connections for my site. 

Now I can keep sharing more of their content and mentioning them to get on their radar. Eventually I'll be able to work with them on guest posts have them share my content. 

I was able to cut through and find the bloggers most likely to engage with me in the future. 

Would I Recommend Tweeting Every 30 Minutes?

Here's the thing. This experiment was pretty loose. I could easily adjust things to improve my results like Tweeting multiple posts from each blog or Tweeting even more frequently.

I will say that upping my Tweet frequency got more engagement and grew my followers, which is nice.

If you have the time/resources to up your Tweet frequency, I'd say go for it. It'll probably benefit you. I'm going to try to Tweet more frequently with this new account from now on, but not quite every 30 minutes. 

Have you seen any benefits from Tweeting more frequently? Leave a comment and let me know!

And if you'd like to see me do any other experiments, feel free to send me an email.​