What Does Twitter Followers per Tweet Tell Us?

I had a chance to attend a Social Media Breakfast at Best Buy's corporate headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota this morning. The topics ranged from Twitter to, well, Twitter.

There were some strong opinions expressed on how Twitter should be used. For example, some people seem to believe that Twitter is a conversational medium, so anyone using the service for 1-way communications is, in effect, using the service incorrectly.

This seemed like an odd statement to me, considering that some of the most popular "users" on Twitter are, in fact, 1-way broadcast tweets from companies like Wordpress, CNN, FireFox, and The New York Times.

None of those Twitter users use @replies, favorites, or presumably, direct Tweets. They are truly 1-way conversations.

Extreme Twittering

Live Twittering of this event was extraordinarily high. In fact, it was the most tweeted about event this morning with ~540 Tweets produced regarding the event within 2 hours. Four hours after the event, post-event tweets continue to roll in at a rate of one approximately every 10 minutes.

As I look through the tweets that went out during the event, I realized that few would be valuable to anyone other than the people who were already sitting in the room. And they weren't particularly valuable to people in the room since many were simply recalling what was just said.

The one tweet I sent quoted one of the presenters who said, "There is a lot of crap on Twitter." Looking back on what was said by this experienced Twittering crowd certainly reinforces that statement for me.

Followers per Tweet

As I thought about this more, I figured that there many be some form of "chatter" metric worth creating. This is my first swing at that.

Using Twitterholic's data, I divided the top-100 most followed Twitter user's number of followers by their number of tweets to date, then re-ranked the top-100 by Followers/Tweet. For example, currently have 590 followers and have sent 709 updates to date for a ratio of 0.82.

Here's what it looks like for the top-100 most followed Twitter users:

Click here for a larger version. However, not every column is labeled in this graph so check the spreadsheet for all rankings.

Ranked this way, the top Twitter account become:
- wordpress (wordpress) 398.40
- Barack Obama (BarackObama) 354.58
- macrumors (macrumors) 274.46
- Stephen Colbert (StephenColbert) 241.05
- Henry Rollins (HenryRollins) 165.12

And the bottom five (among the top-100 most followed) become:
- Chris Brogan (chrisbrogan) 0.60
- C.C. Chapman (cc_chapman) 0.57
- Jim Long (newmediajim) 0.44
- Wayne Sutton (waynesutton) 0.39
- New York Times (nytimes) 0.30

So, what does that mean? Here are a few ideas:

1. You don't need to have a 2-way conversation to build a large following on Twitter. Publishing content people interesting, such a software updates, headlines, or humor are valuable whether or not you engage your followers.

2. When I look at the post volume of the bottom five on the list, I see users (human and automated) with extraordinarily high Twitter update volumes. I imagine many Twitter users have followed these users at one time but later unfollowed after realizing their volume was overwhelming. CNN at 10th vs NY Times at 100th is a good example of this. CNN is much more selective is what they publish to their popular "Breaking" feed than the NY Times is to their feed where international, national, sports, and city room stories are all bundled together creating more noise than signal for many users.

Burning Through Followers?

I imagine gaining a follower back who's previously unfollowed has to be quite difficult since they've felt burned before.

With this in mind, I think a strong case could be made for slowly building a strong, loyal, following over time by focusing on quality over quantity.

Listen to this article posted by Ed Kohler on August 22, 2008 2:49 PM | Permalink
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Cool stats and nice breakdown. But you may want to inlcude an over time element here. Followers is a current stat, whereas updates is a cumulative stat.

For example, I have close to 3000 updates with around 300 followers. I think my first 1000 updates came with much less followers.

3. Posted by: Ed Kohler on August 23, 2008 6:32 PM:

Steve, good point. I thought about that but think the lifetime updates vs current followers illustrate the point I was trying to make. People who are very heavy Twitters are going to burn through followers over time who - while they enjoy the person's Tweets - decide the volume is too high or too high for the quality on average.

While I can't prove it, I bet some of the people with the lowest follower/tweet ratios have some of the highest numbers of ex-followers.

you fail to account for reputation. when you talk about a large company or a brand then perhaps you don't need to participate as actively since people are already familiar with you, it would sure help though. compare that to someone who has not yet made a name for his/herself on twitter yet. in that case the 2 way communication is essential. there is a difference between building a name or leveraging an already existed popular one.

jacob

Interesting point, Jacob. It seems to suggest that if someone says valuable things - whether funny, informative, newsworthy, etc., but doesn't interact with people - through public responses, they won't be able to build a following. "Essential" seems a little strong to say that's impossible since there are plenty of examples among the top-100 most followed Twitter users who contradict that. Jason Kottke and Dooce come to mind.

"What percentage of your tweets are valuable to 99% of your followers?" may be a decent thing to consider before Twittering. Especially if the goal is to build an audience of busy people who are more interested in quality than quantity.

I believe it's possible to build an audience on Twitter no matter what you Tweet about, whether you prefer 1-way broadcasts or 2-way conversations. The key is to figure out which format will allow you to reach the people who are most valuable to you. Instead, I see many people who end up with a group of followers they decide are valuable but are either ignoring most of the Tweets they receive or have nothing but time on their hands. Either way, I doubt that's the ideal audience for most Twitterers if they stepped back and gave it some thought.

Your logic is flawed, Ed. Here's why:

Jacob commented about the reputation of people vs brands.

Let's focus on two brands that ought to be easily recognizable by everyone in the world:

@TheWhiteHouse has 9 friends, 802 followers, and 1,077 tweets

@DowningStreet has 4,454 friends, 3,932 followers, and 790 tweets

If you haven't seen either feed:

* the official Twitter channel for the President of the United States is comprised of 100% broadcast messages, not unlike CNN or Wordpress, that point people to URLs of press releases on whitehouse.gov.

* the official Twitter channel for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is comprised of approximately 50-50 of broadcast messages and reciprocal conversations.

You said that the most followed Twitter channels have the least amount of friends and the most amount of broadcast messages. If that is true, how do you account for @DowningStreet?

You are assuming several things:

People read who they follow. I think less and less people are doing that.

jacob is right . reputation also counts

Some people tend to follow people who follow back.

THere are many factors, and I think you might be trying to surmise or conclude something that isn't there....

Or say trying to make sense out of all the nonsense in twitter.

I'd agree that one-way communication on Twitter is often quite effective. One of the best examples I found for my upcoming book (see link above) was Dell, which has been pretty successful at advertising deals on computer gear via a growing number of one-way Twitter accounts. The company also does the two-way quite effectively via a separate set of accounts.

Ari, I think the examples of the differences between CNN and the NYTimes followers help explain the differences you point out: Quality and quantity matter.

Will human written Twitters always perform better than auto-tweets? While your example would lead one to believe that, I don't think there is much evidence to support that.

wilsonng, yes, I am definitely assuming that people read who they follow. I'm doing this under the assumption that people using Twitter would like to be read, so should figure out what people like to read. I believe people who create content that is consistently valuable to the bulk of their current followers get read more often and unfollowed less often.

Trying to make sense out of nonsense can be fun.

Julio, it sounds like Dell has a well thought-out Twitter strategy. I'm looking forward to reading your book.

I thought I read somewhere the CNN Twitter account is not operated by CNN...?

Dave,

@CNN with some 5,000 followers is operated by CNN.
@CNNBrk with some 32,000 followers is not operated by CNN.

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