Be active... but to what extent?

So ever since jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, I've been astonished by the amount of content that is generated. Some users that I've come across have produced thousands -- or even tens of thousands -- of tweets in a matter of months. Echoing (or perhaps informing) the advice of countless others, Kaplan and Haenlein affirm the general principle that social media users should, well, be social (p. 66). And there seems, on Twitter at least, to be a race to the top -- an urge to "live-tweet" events or comment on breaking news as it happens. Some users even use third party programs to feed RSS news feeds through Twitter, and, in essence, turn their accounts into dynamic automatons that announce the latest stories as they're posted. Others enable their digital ever-presence by scheduling Tweets to go out throughout the day. One prominent feminist activist I know, for example, aggregates hundreds of daily historical quotes and tidbits that might be of an interest to her followers and schedules them (days? weeks? months?) in advance to go out as tweets. She has a few thousand followers, so maybe it's working. Then again, she's pretty well known, so maybe there's more to the story. In any case, I rarely hear strategists talk about how much is too much. At what point does tweeting 10, 20, 50, or 100 times each day negatively affect a user's ability to maintain or increase their following? Obviously a user should engage with their followers, but how much is too much? And when?

But how much is too much?