What would you do to increase
your Twitter followers?
I am torn between two lovers: One lover seduces me to increase my Twitter followers in order to build a larger community. The other lover insists it is not the quantity, but the quality that counts.
It is a difficult choice. When you start a Twitter account, you need to build a community, and interact with people. In short, you need people to start following you. On the other hand, “More” is not “better”, as there is a big difference between “reaching a lot of people” and “reaching those who matter”…
On one side, I don’t agree with those who see their total of Twitter followers as their main measure of success for their Twitter outreach. On the other hand, if, as an organisation, you only have 100 followers, you won’t have much impact..
And there are so many ways to fake it.. “Buying Twitter followers” is just one of them. There might be another trick: Many Twitter accounts with a large following, also follow a lot of people. I mean tens of thousands.. I suspect them to follow-back new followers automatically.
So I thought of doing an experiment…
The experiment
My question is: “How many people follow back?”. If I would start a nonsensical Twitter account, and start following random people, how many followers could I amass? How many would follow me, simply because I follow them, and not necessarily because I have something interesting to say?
So here is the experiment: I took @TheWeirdBit, one my dormant Twitter accounts. It is fed with automatized random nonsensical news, without any manual intervention.
So this is where we started from:
As you can see, the Twitter account followed 65 and had 45 followers.
I then started following random people: I looked at Justin Bieber’s 60 million followers and clicked “Follow” for his most recent followers.
I guess you can not do it more randomly: A nonsensical Twitter account, following random people.
Every other day, I followed a hundred or so more of Justin’s followers, careful not to trip Twitter’s spam triggers.
The outcome
After a month, this was the outcome:
25% of those I followed, followed me back. I was now following 1,627 random people, and 418 followed me back. In one month, I increased my following with a ten-fold. Even though I had nothing significant to say, and I had no real link with these followers.
My conclusions
(1) If you want to “trick the system”, you can: The amount of people who follow you is NOT the single measure of success for your Twitter outreach.
(2) If you want to build a Twitter community, start following people: But do it conscientiously: Follow people with similar interests, part of your target audience. A minimum of 25% will start following you back.
…But don’t stop there.. Don’t just follow people. Remember these basic parameters that make people follow you, of which the most important ones are: tweet relevant and interesting content, and interact with your followers…
What are the most relevant Twitter performance figures?
OK, stop bitching now.
I understood that the amount of followers is not the single and most important Twitter performance parameter. I now understood that the figure of “10,000 followers” would only be relevant if those are “10,000 followers which are part of my target audience”.
But.. what other parameters should I use to measure my Twitter outreach?
Well, we tackled that question during one of our recent workshops, with twenty experienced communicators.
It all depends on your online media strategy, of course, but if you use Twitter to interact with a community of your followers, and to link them to content on your blog and website, a set of performance measures would be:
1. The number of interactions: Retweets, Mentions, Direct Messages, Favored tweets.
2. Target Audience reached: Amount of followers and amount of followers who are part of your target audience.
3. Conversions: Amount of click-thru’s from tweeted links to your blog or website.
4. If you use specific event hashtags, measure their performance by the amount of contributors to your hashtag, and the amount of Twitter users reached through your hashtag.
Illustration courtesy Jeremie Tisseau