Aiming to demonstrate that in the social web anything is valid if it leads to the results you’re looking for (as long as you don’t engage in unfair or illegal activities or actions that are damaging to you or other users and businesses), I will be talking about a practical option linked to the creation of content and how it can be shared on Twitter so it has more exposure. Then, I will write about the opposite practice and how it can also work.
Option 1: increasing traffic
I’ve always liked to challenge the established doctrine. This is one such occasion. Perhaps some people won’t like it but it works; the numbers don’t lie. Each Twitter post is first tweeted three times at 12-hour intervals on the first day, then once a day for the next four days, at different times and then one post a week for the following three months. Every post will be clicked on a given number of times, with only 10% of clicks being from the same people. If I limited that post to only once, it would lose three-quarters of those clicks. For the most part, I learnt this from Guy Kawasaki.
That is, share links to the source 3 times at different times during the first day, once a day during the next 4 days, twice during the following week and, finally, once a week during the next month. Change the time of publishing, the message you use and day of the week (usually exclude the weekends). This will allow you to reach more people and make it easier to find the content you create, as well as increasing your conversion rate.
People are in Twitter at different times and not everyone reads down their timeline. So, it’s OK for you to create your own sharing structure. Don’t worry about what other people say about how you should use Twitter, or any other tool or platform for that matter.