Disclaimer: I have recently gone back to following 98% of those who follow me.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time using Twitter wants to get more followers. Some people dream of making it to 100 followers, some dream of 1,000, others still dream of even more. Everyone has different ideas about how to increase the amount of followers they have. I had a few of my own ideas so I decided to put them to the test.
I noticed that for the most part the people with a large amount of followers also had an equal or even greater number of friends. The amount of people who had thousands of followers and only a handful of people they followed were limited to celebrity personalities.
The first thing I wanted to figure out what would happen if I started following everyone possible. I didn’t discriminate at all about who I followed. I followed everyone possible. I went from following about 125 people to following over 500. This is evident in the graph below. The giant spike in followers correlates to the same time as the tremendous increase in the amount of people I was following.
This didn’t really surprise me all that much. It was consistent in what I thought would happen. What I wasn’t sure about is what happens when you stop following most of the people on your list. I knew that there would be a decrease. The question was how much of a decrease I would see.
When trying to guess how many people would stop following me as a result of me no longer following them I had one central question in my mind. Would they even notice? Apparently the answer was yes. My followers peaked at 351 and two weeks later it has dropped to 258, a drop of about 100 total followers. They noticed, but didn’t exactly notice overnight. It was a steady decline over time.
One final thing I was curious to find out about was how much of a bump in followers being re-tweeted would give me. A few days ago I tweeted something about a Calvin and Hobbes comic. Much to my enjoyment it was re-tweeted several times. All of the people who re-tweeted my tweet had a total of about 4,000 followers. There was no way to figure out the overlap, and there must have been at least some. However, despite @kylelibra being mentioned to several thousand people, there was absolutely no noticeable increase in followers. If I had to guess I would say that this is because everyone who checked out my profile noticed that I didn’t return people’s follows. Interesting to note, but by no way was there any scientific backing to this.
I’ve reached one main conclusion: if you want to have a lot of followers, you need to follow those who follow you. There are a lot of different views on following etiquette to consider.
Like this article? Check me out on Twitter @kylelibra, I follow everyone who follows me. (I’ve learned my lesson)
You went way farther in depth with Twitter than I think I will ever go. I only want to follow the people that I care about listening to and who give good info. I don’t actively seek new people to follow really either since not that many people I know use it. If my phone had internet and more SMS available, then I may care more.
When I get to NYC, things may change and I hope that I can find something that will give updates on things going on in the city. Do those kind of Tweets exist?
I agree with this sentence completely…
The amount of people who had thousands of followers and only a handful of people they followed were limited to celebrity personalities.
it’s so true.
if they aren’t connecting… what’s the point of being on twitter?
Great post kyle!