What gets you Twitter followers? Part 2: friends and frequencies
I’ve been analysing data from 50000 Twitter accounts, recorded by my Twanalyst tool (tracks your Twitter stats over time, and analyses your tweeting style and personality). In Part 1, I looked at how people’s profiles might correlate with their number of followers, and a few trends emerged.
This time I’ve been looking at the relationship between follower counts and the following:
- Number of friends
- Time since joining Twitter
- Number of tweets written
- Average number of tweets written per day
In each graph below, the X-axis shows the above data, with follower counts on the Y axis. The Y figures are averages taken for each value of X.
Friends
Friends/followers
The green line is the estimated line of best fit by OmniGraphSketcher (excellent Mac graphing program) - though it seems slightly generous. (I’ve cut friends off at 100000, as the few data points above that are so high that the rest of the data becomes unclear.) Roughly speaking, and unsurprisingly, there’s a one-to-one relationship between friends and followers. Want followers? Make friends.
Time
Days/followers
Obviously you need to have been on Twitter for a little time to get followers - but overall there isn’t really any strong correlation noticeable between how long you’ve been using it and how many followers you have. It must be what you do with Twitter that matters, rather than simply Being There.
Tweets
Tweets/followers
This doesn’t seem to show much, either. What might be helpful is to measure this against time…
Rate
Tweet rate/followers
When you measure the average number of tweets per day (since joining Twitter, and I’ve ignored a handful of rates over 300/day), a broad message comes across that you’re best of tweeting up to around 30 times a day - above that, and you risk putting people off. Again, this isn’t exactly surprising.
So there aren’t really any profound observations here, sorry: the data seems to corroborate common sense.
In the third and final part of this series, next week, I’ll see if there are any correlations between tweeting style (as recorded by Twanalyst - number of retweets, posting of links, how much you reply to other people etc) and follower counts. Thanks for listening!
PS: I’m indebted to the UNIX BASH Scripting blog for an awk script that helped crunch this data.
Originally published at hatmandu.net. You can comment here or there.