Why Tweeting More Is The Secret To Leveraging Twitter

There's an experiment a pottery professor did on their students for a semester. On the first day of class, students were presented with two options which would decide how they would be graded. Option A required students to submit a new piece every week for the whole semester, in a pass or fail manner. If they didn't submit a piece, they would fail that week. Option B required students to submit just one piece at the end of the semester and the professor would grade them on the quality of that piece.

At the end of the semester, the professor noticed something remarkable. The general quality of the pieces submitted between the two groups heavily favored one group. Those that created 20+ pieces over the semester created the more beautiful, refined pieces by far. They had many more iterations to experiment and test out different techniques and styles. The students graded on volume learned much more over time than those focused on quality for just one piece.

I love this parable, because it's so applicable to all skills in life. Experimentation and volume are king. When it comes to maximizing engagements and building an audience on Twitter, this approach will fully maximize your results.

Tweeting more, just the sheer act of increasing your volume, will earn you more followers and foster a more engaged audience if consistently sustained over time. At the same time, your Twitter skills will refine themselves as you learn what works and what doesn't on the platform.

The key here is to understand each tweet will require it's own effort, and low effort spam won't get you anywhere. Try to provide value in some way with every tweet. Over time you'll learn what that is, and you'll start to become known as a high value person in your community.

If you're having a hard time identifying what content is providing value to users, you can search your account on TweetSort, and see how people are responding. Your most liked tweets and your most retweeted tweets will show you which content people love. You can recycle that content, either by retweeting it yourself so people that missed it have another chance to interact, or you can branch off that content and use it to inspire new content. 20% or so of your tweets are going to drive 80% of your engagement. Learn how your 20% of content is accomplishing that and you'll have a solid basis for learning to create value.

Keep following this feedback loop and you'll leverage the power of volume. Continue to study your own output and experiment, and you'll learn how to create good content.

To make a pottery piece takes a lot of time compared to a tweet. So if the pottery students had to create one piece per week, could you write 7 tweets in a week? Writing one tweet a day will give you 365 tweets in a year, if you keep at it. But it's realistic to achieve counts of 1000 and up. The accounts with the most engaged audiences have a correlation with tweeting thousands of times per year and up.

And it's to your benefit to go after this kind of volume! You'll refine your style and personality on the platform through this process.

If you view your Twitter analytics within their web app, I guarantee you'll see your monthly engagement and follower count correlate with your tweet count per month. It's like Twitter is designed to get you to spend as much time as possible on the site!

Just remember to go outside every now and then.