I will continue to chart what happens to my Twitter following for the next several days.
It appears that the greatest decline occurred within 10 hours of unfollowing my list, when 80 percent of the follower loss occurred.
By yesterday at 11:30AM (12 hours after hitting zero), I had lost 3,500 followers. After that, I lost about 100 followers every six hours, and the rate appears to be slowing. It seems likely that I've lost all the people who use applications to automatically unfollow people who don't follow them back, and now I am being unfollowed by people who do so manually. (I predict that the rate of unfollowing will continue to slow until the weekend (starting tomorrow), and then there will be a larger uptick when weekenders login to clean their lists.
It is still too early to hypothesize about what impact will come to my @reply rate, my click through rate, or my re-tweet rate. So far, however, those stats don't seem to have changed at all.
Thanks so much for sticking with me as I conduct this experiment!
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.
Mr. Marlow,This is a worthwhile experiment, but there’s also another factor which I’ve noticed about Twitter, and it relates to follower counts as well.My follower count drops whenever Twitter decides to purge Spammers. I fretted for a while about it, now I ignore drops in follower counts. Twitter has become overwhelmed with spam accounts, and I see that you’re seeing the spam bots affect your follower counts. It confirms my belief that the follower count is elastic and nothing to worry about.I will pop on there and do some “live” tweets, but I have Posterous updating my Twitter feed with my content. Beyond that, I don’t have much use for it. I purge non-followers with “friend or follow,” which helps balance the account. From here on in, I don’t even know if that will be worthwhile.Norman