Tweet-Fatigue. Are We Posting Too Many Tweets and Turning Off Our Audience?

Is it possible to scare away our social followers by sending them too much content too frequently?

Absolutely. Burning our followers with incessant or irrelevant Tweets [X’s] should be everyone’s concern. Expect blocking or muting to happen to our tweets if we tweet too frequently.

Well, someone had to say it.

Social media is a fun and exhilarating opportunity for creatives to advertise our wares and develop an online presence. It offers a free platform to showcase our art and establish an audience.

But X is one messy monster to wrangle. Due to its size, it’s flush with trillions of pieces of content. It’s everything all at once. It’s easy to post on X, but it’s just as easy to get that special post lost. 

Unless it’s a super trending post (or part of someone else’s), every post sent to X is like adding a needle to a needle stack and expecting someone to go and find it, much less care to look for it.

As I scroll through my X feed, I have to scan hundreds of thousands of Tweets to find something I like. Not all Tweets are interesting or relevant. Many are inflammatory. I prioritise posts by filtering the content and immediately shutting down annoying or aggressive tweeters. They vanish from sight forever. They don’t even know it has happened.

It got me thinking: if I block and mute some tweeters to save time and sanity, would someone else do the same to me if I sent too many tweets?

Of course, they would. We all have our limits. We’re only human. If there’s a way to shut off annoyances, we should allow ourselves the opportunity to act on it.

I looked at this morning’s feed:

‘Boss level achieved, 850 words written today score!’ Reads a Tweet

‘This procrastination is driving me crazy. Think I’ll take a nap.’ Reads the next.

‘I just filled my gas tank. Why is it so expensive in CA?’

‘I have no motivation and I’m soooooo tired.’

These tweets are not direct messages but general X broadcasts designed to go to everyone. From my end, they’re irrelevant. Mute-worthy?

Not all authors use social media sparingly. Instead, they think X is a place to wage a text war. They arm themselves with their ideas, opinions, products or services, step up to the platform and blast indiscriminately into the abyss, hoping to hit something along the way.

Hello, mute button.

It is possible to find exciting tweets, but they make up a tiny portion of the feed. Global-sized quantities of alphabet slurry get in the way. As our follower numbers grow, so does the alpha-slop.

‘I can’t think of anything to say so I’m going to go to bed. Goodnight X.’

Goodnight X? X doesn’t care whether you sleep, live or die. Mute you too!

Perhaps I’m too old to understand this new kind of jibberish.

How many Tweets are too many? How many Tweets does it take until blocks or mutes happen? Let me answer the last question first.

We won’t know if it’s happening to our tweets. X doesn’t tell us who clicked mute or block. It also doesn’t tell us someone disconnected. (If we keep a list of followers, we could compare lists before and after the disconnects to determine the answer).

If you have 10,000 followers, but half blocked you, and the other silenced you, no one will see your tweets. You can still tweet but won’t be wiser about its results.

Use your own experience as a gauge. If you’ve made a few disconnections of your own, I guarantee that whatever reason you had to do that is a reason that’s good enough for someone else to use, too.

Quality tweets. Quantity is cheap. Quality is classy.

Tweeting about a friend’s cat, a car, the rising cost of Cheetos, or how your foot itches isn’t quality content. It cheapens our online presence to do so.

Mute starts looking really good to those who don’t care about our feet, know what Cheetos are, or prefer dogs.

Less is more.

I don’t expect my advice will change those who love blasting their way on X. They’ll tweet despite what I say about it. This post is for those who use self-control and want to establish a better media presence.

Readers want to discover new and inspirational worlds, not trudge through the mire of Here’s my nothing in particular tweets or the same one posted a hundred times over the past hour.

Bye.

-M

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