Is 22 Tweets-Per-Day the Optimum?

Ever wonder how often you should be tweeting? How much is too much, and why do some people seem to do nothing all day but sit around posting to Twitter?

One of the great things about tools like Twitter Grader is that they allow you to do all sorts of interesting data analysis. Our database includes stats on more than 1.6 million Twitter user.

The average tweets per day (TPD) I measured was 4.422 and the average number of followers for users in the database was 103.39.

Below is a graph of the distribution of those 1.6 million Twitter users' average number of tweets per day. Notice that most users fall towards the low end of the range, meaning that most users only tweet a few times a day (or less).

What is more interesting than that is what happens when we the graph average number of followers of users at various TPD levels. As you can see by the graph below, a sweet spot emerges. Users who tweet between 10 and 50 times per day have more followers on average than those that tweet more or less frequently. The "peak" of the curve below is at about 22 tweets per day.

There are a small but siginificant number of users who tweet more than 150 times per day on average, but when added to the above graph they only continue the downward trend to the right.

At the extremely high-end of the spectrum the TPD metric shows top users at a variety of different posting rates. The blue line on the first graph represents the follower counts of the 50 most followed users, and the red line represents their tweets per day. The table at the end of this post is the tweets per day of the 20 most followed users in our database.

User		Followers	Tweets Per Day
	barackobama	316651	0.38
	CNNBrk	263730	0.81
	stephenfry	226854	8.06
	twitter	205758	0.37
	britneyspears	191126	0.53
	kevinrose	177949	2.72
	Nytimes	174635	39.04
	lancearmstrong	164864	7.85
	algore	156223	0.12
	ev	148709	3.67
	the_real_shaq	144201	3.48
	aplusk	143299	12.13
	nprpolitics	142835	11.84
	mashable	136364	19.65
	techcrunch	129105	9.64
	Veronica	129017	3.98
	ijustine	128965	7.33
	wilw	128160	6.16