Ben Still has done a bunch of videos recently to promote his entrance into social media. Somehow I always come across them and somehow I don’t ever think they are funny, except for this time. In his latest video, Ben Stiller leaves a writers meeting discussing next tweet to meet with Ryan Seacrest.

This experiment has been going around today. The author explains how he used split testing to figure out if he phrased a question differently would he get better results. He shows the transition through the different phrases and the subsequent click through rate.

There is some obvious criticism of his experiment that can be read in the long thread of comments at the bottom of his page.

As a result I’ve made some small tweaks to this site. I’m interested to see if I can get some more followers on twitter this way.

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)

As more and more people finally get connected to twitter, the inevitably ask, “Who should I follow?” Ask no more. Below is a list of 37 interesting twitter accounts to follow subdivided by categories. I’ve tried to add a lot of variety as well as only include people who actually make updates. If you find these interesting, you should also consider following me on twitter @kylelibra.