Will Marlow

In 24 hours, I have lost another 100 followers.  (Remember, on the first night, I lost almost 2,000 followers, which must include all the people who use applications to auto-unfollow people who are no longer following them.)  As the chart shows, my follower count stands at 8,893.

Although it is still early to look at the results for RTs and @replies, here's something interesting to chew on: In the last 12 hours, I have been retweeted or @replied approximately 23 times on one post.  This is WELL ABOVE average, and a new record for any of my Tweets (my viral Tweets are typically retweeted three or four times).  

This surge of retweets can be explained by two things, I suspect.  First, as Twitter guru Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says, the best thing you can do to get retweeted is to Tweet good shit, and the Tweet that was responsible for almost all of the RTs and @replies was about how in just several days, the amount of money donated via text message to Haitian disaster relief has surpassed the total amount of money given to all charities and causes via text message last year. (That is interesting, and highly retweetable.) 

But the second explanation is that, as I guessed, Twitter reach is not dependent solely on maximizing the number of followers you have.  I had 12,700 followers on Monday.  Yesterday, I had 8,940 followers.  But after losing over 25% of my followers due to my own massive unfollowing, my Twitter reach (as measured simply by @replies and retweets) rose by a factor of more than 5x.

Prediction for the weekend: I still expect to see a more rapid loss of followers over the weekend, as some people tend to update their Twitter feeds only on Saturdays.

Filed under  //   Followers   How to measure Twitter influence   Posterous   Twitter   Twitter Influence   Twitterholic   Unfollow   Unfollow Experiment  

My first observations/conclusions are as follows:

1. So far, no one from the list of people I interact with regularly has unfollowed me. 

2. There were LOTS of bots and spammers following me, who were only interested in a recipricol follow (which I'm happy to lose). 

3. There is a big advantage to following back your followers, in that you can always tell if someone is following you just by looking at their feed.  If I don't ever go back to a 1:1 ratio, not being able to know this will take some getting used to.

4. I am going to add the initial people back very quickly, because I miss the DMs that this group sends me (I don't miss DMs from spammers or bots).

and lastly,

5. There are many people who take the "follow back" ethic very seriously and personally.  I received more than one email angry email suggesting that I was being very rude.  If that's the case, I apologize.  I tried to take precautions against this by warning people in the days leading up to this experiment (which served the dual purpose of telling me who is reading my Tweets).  In any case, my reason for doing this experiment was not to be rude, but to learn more about the dynamics of following/unfollowing on Twitter, and for the next several days I'll be monitoring what happens.

(PS - Interestingly, although my goal was to make it down to zero before adding people back, Twitter's odd numbering system never let me get down below 92 people on my follower list, despite not having a record that I was following anyone.  In addition to that, Tweets from people who I no longer followed continued to show up in my feed until I replaced them with newly re-followed people.)

Filed under  //   Follower Count   How to measure Twitter influence   Social Media   Social Media Plan   Social media strategy   Twitter   Twitterholic   Unfollow