How To Make Your Twitter Followers Grow or Shrink
From Poynter:
The world of science has some new advice for people who want to increase their Twitter following, and it may sound something your mother used to say: If you don’t have anything nice to tweet, don’t tweet at all.
“Expressing negative sentiments in tweets is the second most harmful factor to growing a Twitter audience,” say researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. They speculate about why: “This might be because Twitter is a medium dominated by very weak social ties, and negative sentiment from strangers may be unpleasant or uncomfortable for a potential new follower to see.”
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Another bit of advice based on the findings: Stop tweeting so much about yourself.
“Informational content attracts followers with an effect that is roughly thirty times higher than the effect of [personal] ‘meformer’ content, which deters growth,” the researchers wrote. “We think this is due to the prevalence of weak ties on Twitter.”
In other words, your Twitter followers don’t know you that well and thus don’t care about what you’re eating. Feed them information instead.
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Cramming too many useless hashtags into your tweets (bad)
Link to the rest at Poynter
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The question isn’t how many, but who.
With certain populations, snarky comments gain followers. And other populations seem to be all about personal comments.
Twitter, like the blogsophere, is not uniform, and I think far too many people think only about how many followers they have and too little about who is following them.
Case in point, on a writer’s marketing group I follow, everybody bows down to the great power of one guy who has 30k followers. So I went and looked at who was following him. I actually scrolled through ALL of his followers. They were all marketers, politicians and spammers. All of whom followed way too many people to actually read their twitter feed.
Me, I follow people who tweet interesting things. Sometimes these are humorous updates about themselves, or snarky commentary I agree with. Some of the people I follow do only “broadcast” tweets. Heck, those are the people I most eagerly follow – I consider Twitter as a great place to get news.
I don’t follow people who endlessly tweet promotional tweets. I also don’t follow people who tweet too often.
As with any kind of writing or communication, what is effective depends on the audience you are going for.
“I also don’t follow people who tweet too often.”
Camille,
(no snark) How much exactly, is too often?
brendan
Well, it partly depends on the timing. I don’t like to see my feed overwhelmed by one person’s tweets.
So generally if I go look at your feed, and I keep scrolling and scrolling and I don’t come to the end of today’s tweets, I think long and hard before clicking that follow button.
But I’ve also unfollowed people who sign on, tweet two or three dozen tweets all at once and flood my feed, even though they don’t do it all day long. (NOTE, replies don’t flood into my feed, so they don’t count.)
There was one guy who I normally enjoy following, but he didn’t like the oscars so he decided to tweet the entire freaking Book of Revelations, line by line, during the Oscars with the #oscar hashtag. (He’s not religious, he was just making a “commentary.” One or two lines would have made the commentary just fine: he didn’t need to pee all over everything his followers were trying to read.) He got unfollowed with extreme prejudice.
I also might unfollow if I regularly see three or four of the same exact tweet from a person in one day. (I understand someone announcing something in the morning and at night, but I’m not on Twitter all day long, so I only see a fraction of your tweets — if see the same thing coming up multiple times, you’re spamming.)
There are plenty of other people who LOVE it when people tweet a lot. It’s actually pretty standard advice to tweet often. I’m just pointing out that we’re not all the same and I find it annoying.
That probably because my goal on Twitter is not to get other people to follow me. I actually READ my twitter feed. You know, for the content.
+1 Everything Camille said.
I don’t mind personal updates or sharing sad news. The only thing guaranteed to make me unfollow on Twitter is someone tweeting in a spammy way, or bragging about how many followers they have.
Yes, people actually brag about their number of followers. It’s always hidden in false modesty. “1000 followers? Wow! How did that happen?” A tweet like that always guarantees one less follower. Me.
“A tweet like that always guarantees one less follower. Me.”
:: laughing ::
When I first got on Twitter I had no clue what I was doing. So I tweeted mostly about the novel I was writing at the time. I had no idea that you should look around to find other people you wanted to follow.
So for nearly 2 months I tweeted to my one lone follower – a stranger in Finland who never tweeted himself and who had no information in his profile.
I’ll probably be curious forever about who on earth he was and how he found me!
Finally I realized that I was supposed to follow other people. (Yes, I was clueless!) So I clicked and clicked on that follow button. Good heavens! The spam on my feed multiplied like lost buttons in the bottom of the washer.
Now…I am wondering how to undo what I have wrought!
Just yesterday I logged on with the vow to unfollow some of those spam generators…and I didn’t do it! I know I should. The only tweets I actually read are those I’ve organized into “lists” that I can check easily. But…it feels so unfriendly to unfollow.
Yeah, am I a sap, or what?! :: sighing ::
I enjoy blocking every promoted tweet I encounter. I’ve encountered fewer of them, however, as time has passed.
Oh! How do you do that?
Also…every now and then I want to retweet something, but preface it with my own comment. I see others do this occasionally. But I can’t figure out how they do it. Do you know?
I do that too, LOL.
Click on their name to go to their Twitter page, then use the drop down list to block’em. =)
Cool! I will do that! Thanks!
The “quote tweet” (rather than just re-tweet) is an option in my iOS Twitter app. I don’t know if it’s in other apps, or if it’s in the modern Twitter app. I stopped updating when I had a version I liked, that doesn’t break, and the reviews on new updates were not enthused. >_>
Aha! That must be why I can’t do it. Bummer! It’s not in the basic Twitter.
Weird — my Twitter app is the one Twitter itself produces. Mind, I don’t see that option for the website, and I have no idea if it’s in any of the updated Twitter apps (see “no more updates ’cause it might break what I like”)…
At worst, though, you could copy, then type “RT: ” [hold and paste]” and whatever you want to add?
Do you mean copy the person’s tweet into my own twitter feed and put RT at the front? Or is there a way to “copy” the persons entire tweet, along with their profile graphic?
I do, indeed, tweet from my laptop, not my phone.
I don’t follow people who obviously use Hoot Suite. There will be clusters of their identical posts throughout the day and are so patently are doing it for financial gain. It’s like a TV commercial on heavy rotation.
Well, I haven’t entered the Twitter universe yet, but I’m considering it…not sure I’m brave enough.
But I will thank science for this article – it’s helpful to know what might work or not work.
For example, using long words is helpful? Now that one was a surprise. Who knew?
I mean, who apprehended? comprehended? distinguished? Used a thesaurus?
Enter as a reader first, so you get the idea of what’s going on. And instead of following people at first, make lists. When you put people on lists, they don’t generally follow back, so you can lurk more invisibly. And the list is like a miniature account. You can see what it’s like to be a person who follows all those people, and how certain behavior can be annoying or involving.
Another tip: you might consider ultimately having two accounts — one for personal friendship and reading, the other for your “business.” With the first one you only follow people you want to read. With the second you can freely follow anybody who follows you. If you find either of them don’t work for you, you can quietly abandon it.
Sound like good suggestions – thanks, Camille.