Results from Day 3 of Twitter Experiment (with Chart)
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.
Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.
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