Here’s a question more people should ask: How many tweets per day is too many? While there is no one definitive answer, experts seem to think that 10 to 15 a day is optimal for most people or businesses. That figure might double if you have a large following or are a very public figure.

I was asking the question myself today as I went through my list of followers. I noticed that there were quite a few people who had more than 50,000 tweets in total so I took a look at who they were and whether or not they seemed to have a large following.

How Many Tweets Per Day

Mike Alton at Social Media Hat says that 10 – 12 a day is plenty for most businesses. He personally tweets 25 – 30 times but that’s because he’s a social media expert with a large following in different market segments. Buffer suggests 14 times a day on Twitter as being optimal. So let’s do a little math.

15 tweets a day x 365 days = 5,475 tweets a year.

Twitter was created in 2006. I guess that makes my 50,000 tweet cutoff a pretty good guess. And that’s for the people who’ve been on Twitter all along – most of us haven’t.

How Many Tweets Is Too Many

We all know people who do things to excess. Some people talk too much and others have the same kind of problem on social media. Some people post too often on Facebook for example. But if there is one social media site that really gets abused, it’s Twitter.

Fair warning: you might want to get a beverage of some sort before you read any further. It ain’t pretty folks!

I’m sure you’ve noticed your twitter feed get busier and busier as you picked up more followers. There’s another thing that makes your feed busy besides followers and that’s the out-of-control tweeters. You know, those people who sit at their keyboard and tweet every few seconds or minutes.

I took a look at my list of followers to see what was going on. I did this regularly when I only had a few hundred followers but I admit I lost control a long time ago. It takes longer as your list of followers grows and it’s easy to feel like it’s out of control.

Taming The Beast

I started by looking at the people who weren’t following me back. It seemed like a good place to trim some fat. Turns out, that was a heck of a good idea.

I was shocked at how many people I was following who were not following me back. Worse yet, many of them were tweetaholics – no pun intended.

I won’t mention any names, it’s too embarrassing. Well, alright, just a few:

Did you notice that last entry? @******bytesnews has tweeted over 1 million times. Is that a record? Probably not, judging by what I’ve seen.

Trimming The Fat

Since none of the people on this list followed me back, I unfollowed all of them. Why should I let my twitter feed get bombarded daily by their tweets when they don’t care to see mine!

This is just a small sample of the accounts I unfollowed this morning. For the most part, I only unfollowed people with more than 50,000 tweets that were not following me back. I found well over one hundred.

The Serial Offenders

This is actually just the tip of the iceberg. I found a bunch of serial offenders – people who have tweeted well over 200,000 times. I had been following over a dozen people with a tweets count of between 200,000 to 450,000. That boggles the mind doesn’t it?

I feel I owe my Twitter followers an apology. Shame on me for not dealing with this sooner, and thank you for sticking with me despite the fact I’ve inadvertently allowed some of my followers to polute your Twitter stream.

How To Clean Up The Mess On Twitter

Start by unfollowing anyone with 50,000 tweets (more or less) that isn’t following you back. This takes time when you have several thousand accounts to go through but it’s worth the effort. Apps like Unfollowers make this much easier.

Go through your account once a month and keep weeding these people out. I’m sorry but I don’t want to see a hundred tweets a day from anyone.

Managing Twitter

If you have more than a few hundred followers and you’re still using the twitter interface, take a look at Tweetdeck. It’s an app by Twitter that makes your twitter feed fit for humans. It allows you to put people in lists and you can then simply view the tweets coming from one or more lists at a time.

If someone is tweeting too much, you can remove them from the list without unfollowing much like you can stop seeing posts from someone on Facebook without unfollowing them.

What are your thoughts? How do you deal with overly active tweeters? What tools do you use with Twitter?