How often to post to Twitter ?

 Along with their analysis of Facebook post frequency, Social Bakers also studied Twitter, taking a random sample of 11,000 tweets from top brands and concluding that three tweets per day is the point where brands start seeing big engagement.

In the chart above, total engagement rate measures the total number of replies, retweets, and favorites. Average engagement rate is total engagement divided by the number of tweets sent on a given day.

In both cases, three tweets was the magic number for optimal posting.

Three tweets isn’t that many, though. Could this really be the magic mark for optimal frequency? Are we all doing waaaay more work than we need to?

Depends.

Specifically, it depends on what you want to measure. The engagement per tweet measure can tell you at what point your individual tweets reach their maximum performance levels. Track Social found this to be a similar number to Social Bakers. Per Track Social, response per tweet peaks at five and then drops off.

So if you want to wring the most value out of every tweet you send, tweet about five times each day.

The other way to look at this is with response per day, a clearer measure of the total amount of interaction a brand has with its audience. When Track Social observed this stat, the recommendation changed.

If you want to wring the most value out of your Twitter presence as a whole, tweet up to 30 times per day.

Basically, what this chart is saying is that the more you tweet, the more opportunities you have to engage with fans, and the more total response you will receive. It is a study in scale. Greater volume should correlate to greater total response, and the chart above shows this to be true.

The takeaway here would be in observing the spikes, when responses jumped at different volumes of tweets. Spike #1 occurred around 4-5 tweets per day, Spike #2 at 11-15 tweets, and Spike #3 at 21-30.

Alexandra Skey of Spokal has a helpful note here: Small business owners are better off adhering to the 5 tweets per day rule because it gets you the maximum bang for your stretched buck. You may not have time for 20+ tweets per day (14 at Buffer is a job unto its own some days). Make the most of the time you do have.