How often should you tweet? How important is the quality of your tweets? Here’s my take.

As a general rule, you should tweet as often as you’ve got something worth saying. But it’s really more complicated than that. Because the more often you tweet, the higher the quality of each tweet needs to be.

Why? Because a few low quality tweets are no big deal — they soon disappear from the tweet stream and are forgotten. But if you constantly remind your followers that you’re a low-quality tweeter, and your tweets are filling up their tweet stream, eventually they’ll get fed up and unfollow you.

I’ve unfollowed multiple “gurus” who tweeted a lot of useful stuff because they tweeted too much useless stuff. It just wasn’t worth picking through the coal to find the diamonds.

And here’s the kicker — it’s not like they were tweeting a lot of worthless stuff — most of their tweets were plenty good for a low volume tweeter. The problem was that their volume was so overwhelming that they would have had to have been delivering incredibly exceptional value for me to be willing to continue to put up with the deluge.

Just so you don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that you should only tweet stuff that others can profit from. I prefer people who mix in some personal stuff. For example, when Harris Fellman tweets about his kids, I can relate to that — it injects an enjoyable human element into following him.

In summary, never tweet worthless junk. Sometimes tweet personal stuff — especially stuff that others will relate to. Make sure a fair proportion of your tweets are very high value, and make the proportion higher the more often you tweet. Don’t tweet more than about (pulling a number totally out of the air) about 15 – 20 times a day unless you’re consistently delivering exceptional value.

(Oh, and replies don’t count towards that total as long as you send them using the reply button and don’t enter anything before the username of the person you’re replying to).