Recently, Amber Recker asked an interesting question on Twitter:

It was a question that’s been on my mind lately as I’ve seen more and more people promote their blog posts multiple times a day for a week or more after its initial publication on Twitter and Facebook, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn. The theory behind these multiple updates is simple: because people use social networks at different times, repeating the link increases the size of your potential audience. After all, you wouldn’t want anyone to miss your words of wisdom, right?

The poster child for the repeated tweet strategy is Guy Kawasaki. His popular Twitter account tweets the same links up to four times in a 24-hour period. He doesn’t change the language of the tweet, just varies the time. Why? Because it works. Kawasaki gives the example of tweeting the same link at 3:00 a.m., 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Respectively, the tweets received 739 clicks, 718 clicks and 565 clicks. To take it from the horse’s mouth:

If I follow common wisdom, I would have tweeted it once and lost 1,200 clicks—that’s the bottom line.

I tend to be a proponent of that “common wisdom” Kawasaki mentions. Usually, I tweet once and if it’s good, I know the content will rise. If not, that’s okay–not every blog post is a superstar. But I was curious, so I conducted a very small, very non-scientific experiment of my own. I tweeted a link to the same blog post four times in a 24-hour period. Now, I couldn’t bring myself to tweet the exact same content each time, so here’s what I shared:

How do you deal with anger online? When do you respond, when do you walk away? ow.ly/8L5tH

Can you ever really “win” an argument online? Is there any point? ow.ly/8LKXP

Fact: The Internet is filled with jerks. How do you deal with them? ow.ly/8LL1I

Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em with online arguments: ow.ly/8LL6A

And the results? 19 clicks, 6 clicks, 6 clicks and 5 clicks. Hey, I’m not Guy Kawasaki, but I doubled my effective traffic by repeating the tweet. I’m not sure the results would have been at all the same if I had repeated the same message verbatim. I think varying the content is critical to not angering those who have already seen the tweet, while keeping things fresh and interesting for those who haven’t seen it. Will I do this for every link I share? Probably not. But when you have something important or great to share, experiment a little with repeating tweets, and let us know what happens.