Too many Tweets equals Frustration

As a relative newbie to Twitter, and as a student in a graduate level social media course this summer, I’ve been reading a lot of posts from “experts” who purport to explain the best practices of Twittering. It seems like almost all of these folks agree on at least two things:

1) Don’t use the automated function of your blog to post the exact same thing on Twitter, Facebook and every other social media channel you subscribe to…it’s just plain annoying to people if they happen to be following you on more than one channel.

2) Post useful and timely information, but sometimes it’s good to think of the theater axiom, “less is more.” With quite a few Twitter feeds people follow, do they really need to get something from you every hour during the day? And, don’t people want to get fresh content from you, not recycled stuff that some bot has been programmed to regurgitate automatically?

Well, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following one of these “experts” on Twitter who doesn’t seem to believe in any part of #2 above. I’m not going to name him, but I’ll bet you’ve maybe run into one or two of these folks yourself.

I’m writing this post at about 11am. Since midnight last night, just the last 11 hours, this particular Twitterer has tweeted 68 times. That’s right, 68! That’s almost a tweet every 10 minutes! As of today, I’ve stopped following him.

In addition, many, if not all of his Tweets are done by an automated system that send out OLD content of his, although there is an occasional re-Tweet of someone else’s OLD content. Sorry, I kind of expect to see FRESH content on Twitter, unless you specifically tell me what I’m going to see is “an oldie but a goodie.”

I sent an email to this guy, asking his thoughts about his tactics. He says his research shows that people don’t mind getting so many tweets from him, and just because it’s old content doesn’t mean it’s bad content. And, he even told me he purposely removes the dates from his old content so people don’t immediately notice it’s old. What gives him away, however, are the comments on his posts, which are sometimes many months old.

What do you think about this? Does it bother you?