The topic of whether or not to repost your tweets on twitter is definitely flame-war fodder. There are people with very strong views in both camps.
Those in favor of it argue that it increases traffic by hitting people who may have otherwise missed your previous message. Those against it argue that quality content will be retweeted and reshared accordingly and will be found on its own.
I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong here, as always I can hang my hat on the time honored ‘it depends’. When I’m in one of these situations I prefer to refer to cold hard data, and I can tell you that the data I’ve seen is on the side of those who choose to repost.
This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. I spent the last 6 years in email marketing, and in that world we often suggest that people strategically remail their clients. Resending an email to all recipients or even just a segment of that group, often increased ROI by 50% to 100%.
I know this one Guy…
Love him or hate him, you have to agree that Guy Kawasaki has a big twitter following. He has grown that following primarily with his @GuyKawasaki and @AllTop twitter accounts. On those accounts he employs a pretty straight-forward reposting strategy of reposting many of his tweets up to 4 times (read the details). If you read the details of his process you’ll find that he generally sees similar click through on each of his retweets. This strongly supports the idea that you are hitting different audiences at different times of the day. It’s also good enough of a reason on its own to support a recommendation to retweet, but let’s look at another example. Similar to Guy, whenever we post something at Argyle we tend to schedule a couple more posts for good coverage. While we don’t have the traffic that he does; we do have some great data on our results.
By looking at several tweets that were posted in the same day we can start to see which times are good for our audience. Here we can see that the 3:30 time slot worked much better than 9:30. Now, this isn’t definitive proof that we should post at 3:30 every day, but with a few more tests we can better understand what times we should be targeting to maximize our impact.
Getting it done without a headache
In order to easily and effectively carry out a reposting strategy, you’re going to want some help. Many of the current subscription based social media publishing tools, like Argyle Social, in the market today offer tools for automating reposting to twitter as well as other networks. Rudimentary scheduling capabilities are also available in free tools, such as TweetDeck and HootSuite. While these tools won’t provide you with in-depth reporting, you’ll still gain the ease of scheduled posting, which is a huge win.Beyond The Twitter-sphere
While reposting is a natural fit for Twitter, it works quite well in other arenas as well. I would be remiss to not point out how to leverage reposting on other social media platforms:- Facebook reposts can make sense on busy walls, especially where your default view includes fan posts. Just be aware that dedicated followers, or those with little newsfeed traffic, may see some redundancy.
- We’ve all seen “Best of …” and “Top Traffic Posts” on some of our favorite blogs. There’s nothing wrong with resurfacing good evergreen content every once in a while. It’s a good idea to note that these blog posts are replays, rather than trying to pass them off as new.
- On the same vein, don’t be afraid to repost popular older blog posts to Facebook or Twitter several weeks or months later, it can spur a new conversation with different perspectives.
- In forums or marketplaces you can see similar results by bumping a result or post to the front page.