On Monday I am going post some analysis of the results of my Twitter Experiment. To give the summary for those of you just joining me, on January 12th I had 12,701 followers on Twitter, and I was following almost all of them, which gave me a 1:1 Following/Follower ratio. In approximately 12 hours, I unfollowed all 12,000+ followers, and I promptly lost over 3,000+ followers, and I continued to lose about 100 followers every six hours thereafter. Currently, I have 8,822 followers, and I’m barely following any of them. As people @reply me, retweet me, or as I become interested in different Twitter feeds, I am slowly rebuilding my following list (hopefully without any spammers or bots or affiliate marketers).
Interestingly, it looks as if my @reply and RT rate are going up, as is my clickthrough rate. My prediction at the outset was that these rates would stay constant rather than rise, and I believe that this uptick could be the result of “deepening” my connection to the portion of my followers who are real people (as well as simply the buzz generated by my dramatic, wholesale unfollowing). I still predict that overall my RT, @reply and clickthrough rates will generally stay constant, but as time passes this will become clearer.
I conducted this experiment for two reasons. The first was to test the Guy Kawasaki Twitter strategy, which partly consists of following back people who follow you out of courtesy. I originally subscribed to this strategy, which is how my following list became so unwieldy. The second reason is that, in my view, a solid social media plan involves two initial stages. The first stage is to “introduce” yourself or your company to a community of individuals who share your interests. The second stage of building a social media presence is to deepen your relationship with your community by producing content that can’t be found elsewhere, and that can’t be produced without an investment of time, planning and risk. I’ll expand on the topic of deepening your social media presence soon.
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.
Thank you for taking on this experiment, Will! As one who is in a niche-within-a-niche-within-a-niche market, it doesn’t make much sense to go for the big number of followers – it’s the VALUE of the followers and the relationships that matter. So I have subscribed to your posterous posts and am thrilled to do so.Are you doing your own analysis? Using any of the free offerings such as ‘TweetStats’ or ‘Friend or Follow’? Ann
(Will, FYI: I am @TheatreSmart on Twitter)
Hi Will, I’ve been following your tweets with interest – more than ever, I do admit, since you announced that you were unfollowing most tweeters – me included. My numbers never reached yours but I did make the same decision because my twitter account became unwieldy and I saw no benefit to follwing a huge number. I realized that most of the tweeple I was following and who were following me were not interacting with me for a simple reason – they weren’t interested. And I wasn’t interested in their tweets, either. For one thing, there were so many that I couldn’t possible read them all and so my twitter page just became noise.When I unfollowed almost all, my relationships with the ones left deepened. We’ve found our points of commonality or interest and built on them. My following number is still higher than I would like and about 25% of the accounts I follow don’t follow me. These are accounts like TED, Baseline Scenario, Garr Reynolds, and others who impart such fantastic information that they are one of the main reasons I’m on twitter.I do agree that having huge numbers, at least at the beginning, is the way to introduce oneself to others. And from there the self-selecting process begins to take over. My guess is that people like Guy Kawasaki use tweetdeck with a very limited number of people on a elite list and those are the tweets they actually read – maybe peruse their @ box once in a while.So, I’ll continue to follow with interest your experiment and see what tips I can pick up. And if you’re interested in some fantastic people to follow check out the ones I follow!Thanks for keeping the crowd informed!Best, Kristina
I did this some time ago with near identical results:http://twitter-fail.com/2009/10/22/how-to-get-fewer-followers-on-twitter-and-why-this-is-a-good-thing/