- Twittaquitta - will send you a mail with your new followers and unfollowers
- Twunfollow- will send you only the unfollowers
I read the paper: Measuring user influence in twitter: the million follower fallacy by Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto and Gummadi. They researched and compared three measures of influence on Twitter: indegree (followers), retweets (how often a message is resend by followers) and mentions (the number of times a person is mentioned by others on twitter). Traditionally a lot of research has gone into the influentials who can persuade others. A modern view how ever de-emphasizes the role of influentials in innovation, and pays more attention to the interpersonal relationships and the readiness to adopt innovations. A trend can be initiated by any one, and if the environment is right, it will spread.
The most followed users in the research spanned public figures and news sources (CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama) and celebrities like Britney Spears. The most retweeted were aggregation services like Mashable and Twittertips, businessmen like Guy Kawasaki and news sites again. The most often mentioned were the celebrities.
Interesting findings:
- The number of followers was not related to mentions and retweets. Hence the most followed users were not necessarily the most influential in getting a message spread.
- Influentials were influential in a wide range of topics, not only their own field
- Broadcasting too many tweets puts popular users at risk as spammers
- Users who limit their tweets to a single topic showed the largest increase in influence scores
The Science of Social Media from HubSpot on Vimeo.
Dan Zarrella dismantles the idea that ideas spread 'because they are good'. This is not the case, it depends on the ability to reproduce yourself. Most ideas get less than one retweet. Compared to animals, you have the elephants (live long) and the fruit flies (live short but high fecundity). The tweets may be compared to the fruit flies, you need to seed widely to have an impact.
Some highlights from Dan Zarrella:
- The more negative remarks, the less followers people have on Twitter
- The hoax about the death of Nelson Mandela was spreading not because the person starting it was influential but because it was well-timed, well-worded. He didn't have many followers, but they were well connected.
- Now that everybody is tweeting there is link fatigue. In weekends the number of tweets slow down, but the click throughs go up.
- Novelty gets spread, if nobody has heard about something, it spreads.
- Most retweetable words include you, twitter, please, retweet (and how to, and new blogpost)
- Least retweetable words include game, going, haha, but also bed, gonna, well, sleep.
Build a well-connected social network around you ready to embrace the changes you envision.Make sure you have unique and interesting information that resonates, information that fills a void. You may ask influential people to tweet or add please retweet. Multiple seeding may be necessary. Calls to action work. Don't tweet that you are gonna sleep :). Monitor your number of mentions and retweets, not the number of followers.
1 comment:
Really this is informative for twitter users.
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