How many Twitter followers should you have?
Posted on | September 9, 2009 | 3 Comments
One of the problems with social media is measuring its impact. Whilst with Twitter it is tempting to use the number of followers as an indication of impact, followers are heavily dependent on the number of streams a Twitterer is following, and the number of updates a person has posted.
A multiple regression analysis based on the data from the people I follow (taking out the outliers identified in the graphs above) produces the following equation:
Expected Followers=1.191*Following + 0.108* Statuses
At the time of collecting the data I should expect to have:
1.191*127+0.108*1,449=307.749 followers
Unfortunately my actual number of followers is only 220, 71.5% of my expected number of followers.
By no means a perfect equation, but it does provide a simple way to compare streams which have been posting for different lengths of time and are following different numbers of people.
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3 Responses to “How many Twitter followers should you have?”
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September 10th, 2009 @ 7:39 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DStuart and Connie Maybree【ツ】. DStuart said: Actual followers/Expected followers: @danslee=0.712644 @DStuart 0.714868286…thrashed! http://bit.ly/3WJP2 [...]
October 6th, 2009 @ 10:16 pm
[...] my previous post I looked at measuring Twitter impact by comparing actual number of followers with expected number [...]
November 17th, 2009 @ 12:17 am
Nice linear equation. For the psychology under it, I’d recon Cialdini’s principle of reciprocity drives part of this relationship. Generally, when someone follows you, you’ll feel obliged to follow that person back in return. The e-marketing gurus and porn spammers have caught onto this principle, and run link bots on Twitter that randomly follow people in the hopes that they’ll respond in-kind, follow the marketers, and then enjoy a delightful stream of spam tweets.