COMMENTS
Hi
I really liked your post about following and being followed on Twitter; a stepped approach seems very wise and has worked for me so far. I would be interested to see something on how Twitterers perceive those with an extremely high ratio of followers to following. It often strikes me as a little standoffish--are these Twitterers getting a slavish following through other means (celebrity, their website, etc.) and don't need to follow back? What are other opinions and are others put off by this? Thanks!
"We see that most users have close to a 1:1 ratio of following to followers, meaning that many users follow-back those that follow them."
a very scientific approach (and conclusion) indeed!
BTW how did you decide that having a close-enough 1:1 ratio proves that the actual users in each group correspond correspond?!?
Why are we obsessed with numbers again? Why do you want lots of followers? What does that mean? If I have 10,000 followers, is that good? Not if 90% are irrelevant and adding no value to my personal network. I personally don't care about numbers, it is the quality of the engagement that matters and I only want people following me who are genuinely interested in my updates or who can help/influence the community I wish to engage with.
The whole followers thing is becoming a smokescreen, it is like untargeted direct mail. Anyone can build a database of millions of names but why bother is most of them don't care what you have to say?
I'm enjoying your Twitter series as it provokes discussion but I can't wait for the quality v quantity mentality to set in.
However, some people might be using Twitter simply as a popularity and positive reinforcement contest, so building followers might make them feel better!
thanks
james
As a brand and social media strategist, working now with a diverse mix of clients, putting social media backbone into position, my Twitter mantra has been to concentrate on quality, and the aggregation of groups, so that those you are following offer relevancy, (like a custom newsfeed)
and those following you benefit from what you share..I agree with phased approach, but best practices are still emerging...
Interesting - I was actually pondering this today. I am not particularly interested in having hordes of followers, but when I have something insightful to share, I will and am interested in other people's thinking, especially company leaders.
Very interesting and great analysis.
I am also interested in "Twitter etiquette". When people decide to follow us, is it good etiquette to follow-back? Or if we decide not to follow-back, is it perceived as we're above following them?
"assume these factors have some sort of causal relationship"
I think this is a highly questionable assumption. Celebrities, like Wil Wheaton or Kevin Smith have a lot more followers than following precisely because they are famous.
Services like senate.gov or cnn might also have large numbers of followers without following back.
The average Joe or Jane can't employ the same strategy and expect the same results as some of the heavy hitters.
Does these figures take include all the big twitter accounts with 10,000's of followers? I.e. BarackObama and CNN etc. As including these can skew the results.
If the same analysis was done without these it would be interesting to see as this gives a more realistic result.
Just a thought…
A retweet for sure! Everyone loves Twitter now.
I only have three followers on Twitter. Informative article!
There is a local company here in Boise that offers a program for $200 that will UP your numbers which they claim will increase your reach, which we all know from MRKTG 101 will increase the bottom line.
They proved the model on themselves & their company (http://MesiabLabs.com)but there is a catch....
THEY ACTUALLY CONVERSE WITH THEIR MASS FOLLOWERS!
They turn to their followers for input and feedback. They launch products to them first, they engage in conversations as if they only had 500 followers.
Even those that have the 1:1 ratio will fail if they don't engage, distribute, RT & treat their followers as THE best customers.
Good luck!
Dan - as a Hubspot customer who loves what you guys do - I have to say this article is NOT a step-by-step guide to the best way to build a Twitter account. That is a complex topic, and this post focuses only on the fact that a 1:1 following ratio is most common.
But that number means very little, because there are lots of reasons people have a 1:1 ratio, having to do with automation and people's notions of appropriateness and fairness. Many very successful Twitterers have a very low following/followers ratio.
For a step-by-step guide to building a good Twitter community, readers should try http://tinyurl.com/cph74l
Thanks and keep up the great flow of Hubspot products. they're great tools.
-isaac d van wesep
@isaac interesting points, I'd love to see the data you based your step-by-step guide on.
I agree with the step approach. While I am no @guykawasaki (despite the fact I play ice hockey with him), I've tried to keep my following / followers within 100. Slow and steady can be frustrating however.
Personally I am always skeptical of folks who have extremely high or extremely low ratios. Dunno why exactly.
I used to follow everyone who followed me but found that unless there was some degree of interest alignment (internet marketing, social media, technology, ice hockey, etc.), those folks would UFM (qwitter). So now I generally follow those who follow me except if I feel I have nothing in common or don't see any interest in their last 5 tweets.
@smokejumper
Do what you do and do it well.
Most successful Twitter accounts follow a very specific set of rules: they only post what is interesting to them. That may sound a little narcissistic but isn't that what most Twitterers are?
The fact that others 'subscribe' to our posts is irrelevant. What matters most is that we are disseminating information we feel is of importance.
Whether or not people are following you because they like what you have to say about a subject, or what you shouldn't have eaten for lunch that day is less as important than the ability to quickly get information out quickly.
That is why Tweeters like @mayhemstudios, @Minervity, @andysowards @Mashable and the like have such HUGE followers: they focus on a few topics of interest and post them so others of like interests can partake in their knowledge.
I (@mimojito) focus on four main groupings: design (tutorials, inspirations, tips & tricks), development (css, html, javascript, jquery et al), SEO & Social Media and topics others post that pique my curiosity.
Twitter is less about who's following you but rather it's more about what you can contribute to the overall community.
My two cents.
My ratio is something like 5:3, more that I follow than follow me. The ratio is mostly unbalanced because I follow a lot of Twitters that are pumping information and links into Twittersphere all day long. I can hardly expect those people to follow me. The would be more likely to follow if I was similarily active on Twitter in a field that would interest them.
But I am vain like everybody else and I am very pleased when people follow me back. 1:1 balance is not predicted for me in the near future. Who cares?
@sigurarm
Dan - the guide I wrote didn't cite data - though I did conduct a survey of Twitter users recently (http://www.centralinbound.com/research.html), & data from that survey did help me write the post.
Admittedly, my survey has not the sample size Hubspot has access to (big thanks to all who took it!), but the results were interesting none the less.
But that is beside the point - a guide such as this doesn't require data
per se - experience counts for a lot more.
The reason I recommended my own guide instead of this one is that the only recommendation here is to keep your ratio of followers/followed near 1. A claim "supported" by data - but even here you've shown only correlation. You have not answered the "why". It's not a step-by-step guide.
I hope you don't take offense to this comment - just giving my opinion, and another option for those looking for a "step by step" guide.
Twitter without numbers. That's what I want. I don't care how many people follow you, it doesn't make your content any better, any more credible, or any more believable to me.
@bradjward
willingthrall is right.
I think there's a correlation vs causation problem here, among other things.
Take a twitterer with 100,000 followers. If they follow all of their followers, then their ratio will be 1. If they don't, it will be far less than 1 (because they wouldn't possibly follow over 100,000 users if they're not blindly following all of their followers).
But a twitterer with 10 followers could have a ratio of (far) under 1 or (far) over 1.
Giving advice to keep your ratio <= 1 because that's what the popular twitterers do is like telling someone that buying sports cars will make them rich because rich people tend to have sports cars.
I disagree. Your study doesn't take into account human nature. I initially followed about 1500 people. Immediately 200 people followed me. This is after months of me having like 100 people followed vs 20 people following me back.
Then i tweeted and didn't follow anyone extra. After a month 200 more people followed me. If people are interested in your tweets, that you have between your friends or if you tweet people back, they follow you.
Especially if you sound interested in their miserable lives.
The suggestions you made helped me a lot getting started with Tweeter.
I left out that I replied directly to people's tweet. Those who weren't following me. It catches their eye and then they think "oh someone likes me, let me follow them"
Each tweet also has "where" the tweet is coming from. Make sure it says
"from web". That means they typed it in by hand.
Interesting.
I automatically block anyone who follows me and has 4 figures or more follows/followers.
Who the heck wants anything to do with these hamster-wheel running morons?
LOL! hamster-wheel running morons.
eh, it's a different set of standards for different people. I live here in Las Vegas and on twitter people follow the zappo guy. He's closing in on half a million followers. Now he's kind of lax and says stuff like "just landed in chicago, boy is it windy". But for business people, you'd expect massive followers and to tweet about, new stuff they have done.
Sure for mom and 3 teenage boys it's probably not so good to follow / be followed by massive amounts of people. [not that i'm a mom or a teenage boy, just putting it out there]
This article shows a statistical view of how some people view Twitter. But the human aspect of it for me is that I get to learn lots of tips from others for free, and to offer my help to others in a no-pressure atmospere.
This is very interesting data but it assumes that most people want to have lots of followers which is not always the case.
I have one friend who went from 200 to 1000 followers and isn't happy about earlier followers who unfollowed him when he started getting more followers (a fact that no one ever mentions but it happens).
Many people use Twitter to form an online social network and it is easier to maintain a close network of 150 or 200 people than 2,000 much less 20,000. Then it just becomes a collection of strangers.
I think as Twitter gets more and more popular, there will be those business people in the numbers race but the bulk of regular users might even downsize their accounts to have a smaller network of closer associates. A similar phenomena is happening on Facebook where I know some people who are reducing their number of "friends" to only people they actually encounter in the lives (family and new & old friends).
In the past month, I've done something I never thought I'd do...block followers who I don't want following me. I'd rather have a lower follower number than have some MLMs following my account. And I know I am not the only one who has started blocking not only spammers but people who are only trying to game the system to boost their social profile. I never thought I'd be a blocking type of person but there are some people I'd just rather not have in my life.
Quality or quantity? There is no contest in my mind which is more important in social networking nor the difficulty of having them both.
I think its all great but as a business person I would think I'd want to stick with the facks man and inform people of my product and or service I have to sell them!For It cost alot of money to do business now day's for anyone,Although just chatting with people you don't know can be fun too! Here's to your success from little" Tony Knight "
Liz is correct about the future of twitter. You can see it already happening on YouTube. As web 2.0 matures and the older stubborn businesses see the light, they will come en masse to web 2.0 to capture the internet and hawk their wares. I think will be hard for the average user to compete in that environment, but the doors wide open for everyone.
Good stuff, but I don't believe the focus should be on followers. It really comes down to who's listening... you hear me:).
I agree, Sandra. My Twitter #1 Rule: It's who you follow, not who follows you.
Great Twitter tips. So following vs. followers has a huge deal to do with Twitter's success?