In a rare meeting prior to setting up a Twitter account, one department asked me to tell them how much is too much Tweeting. I realize I got ahead of myself by not letting them finish and blurted out ‘I will never tell you that you are Tweeting too much – its impossible.’ Here’s what I meant:
Twitter Reading is Selective
Its easy to scan each tweet to see if you need to read further. Its the nature of the communication medium: Twitter users become accustomed to short bursts of information and, in my opinion, are very good at skimming the content. In my own use, I find that I skim, and go back and re-read if its important. This also assumes you are an avid user and have enough followers to dilute multi-tweets from one account.
Following Takes the Place of a Feed
Do you read every post that comes through your RSS reader? Didnt think so. The same is true with Twitter. I dont expect that every Tweet you post from orientation will be read but it will be searchable. Think of it as a bookmark for that information. Someone’s going to stumble upon it at some point and find it useful.
I fear the opposite much more than I do over-tweeting. Do you have a magical equation that you use for your branded account?
On many days, the only manual tweet out of our @sunyoswego college account comes in the morning, the day’s preview and quick weather report. (Seriously, I think people enjoy the weather report.) That’s augmented by an RSS feed of news, student blog entries, athletics scores. I think it’s probably not enough, but then I’m not sure which part of my job I’d have to drop to keep it as fresh, dynamic and engaging as I’d want.
I rarely see institutional accounts that tweet too much. I think most college accounts undertweet for similar resource reasons.