How Many Twitter Followers READ Your Tweets?
I've talked before about how some Twitterers follow way too many people. Some do it innocently, feeling obliged to follow anyone who follows them, and others with less noble intentions.
"Fail Whale, meet Fauxlow Fowl"
The problem is that by the time you're following maybe 100 people (much sooner if many of them tweet actively), there's no way you can possibly keep up with all the tweets.
When you reach that point, the "courtesy" of following whoever follows you isn't much of a courtesy anymore -- all your friend is getting out of your follow ("friends" are the people you're following) is a bigger follower count and a less accurate idea of how many people are actually reading what they have to say.
A while back, I got curious -- I wondered how many of my Twitter followers were following too many people (and thus probably never reading my tweets). I didn't want to spend all day clicking through to their profiles and checking their friend counts. So I considered writing a script to scrape the information and report back to me.
Then I remembered that Twitter has an API that I could use to get the data more effeciently. I found a PHP library for working with the Twitter API and got to work.
This morning, I launched a new website that anyone can use to get an idea of how many of their followers are "fauxlowers" (ie. fake followers).
My numbers? A little depressing:
- Of my 367 followers, 79.2% are fauxlowers (assuming anyone with more than 100 "friends" is a fauxlower -- you can choose the number to use as your threshold).
- My followers follow an average of 2,778 people each! No way are they reading all their friends' tweets!
- My median follower is fauxlowing 1,025 people (ie. 50% of my followers follow less than 1,025 and 50% fauxlow more).
- One of my fauxlowers is fauxlowing 111,109 people.
Now I have to acknowledge that some people who follow thousands of people may actually be reading some of their friends' tweets. That's because there's software that allows you to filter out tweets from "friends" you don't really want to follow.
[...] is, you may have posted to Twitter or Facebook, but you can’t be sure if your message got (a) swallowed up by your followers’ streams on Twitter or (b) ignored entirely by Facebook’s [...]But doesn't that defeat the purpose of "following" them?
September 15th, 2010 at 5:14 am
I started a website recently and purchased 10,000 Twitter followers from [removed] for our Twitter page and the results were amazing! We passed all our competitors when it comes to the number of Twitter followers... some competitors have been in business since 1999, but now we have 30 times more followers than them on Twitter, which made it seem that We've been in business much longer than them !
September 15th, 2010 at 8:09 am
When I see someone with a lot of followers, the first place my eye goes is to the number of people they're following. The number almost always matches their number of followers. That tells me they got their followers by following for reciprocal follows, not by being in business for a long time or being extraordinary.
I guess you can fool some people that way. To me, it makes you look like a faker. I'd be more impressed by someone who was genuine.
And getting back to the point of this post, you may be able to buy a higher follower count, but how many READERS does that get you?
May 25th, 2011 at 6:22 am
is there any tool to check how many people clicked on my tweet
May 25th, 2011 at 7:04 am
Bharat,
I don't believe Twitter publishes stats on how many people view a particular tweet. It'd be impossible to get a meaningful stat anyway, since it's impossible to tell which tweet a person was looking at on their Twitter page, and lots of people read tweets outside of Twitter.
If your interest is in click through numbers for LINKS that you tweeted, then using a URL shortener that gives click stats would do it.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:34 am
Is it possible that maybe the person who is following a thousand people has everyone muted except for the few people they care about?
May 27th, 2011 at 10:57 am
JT,
That's certainly possible. In fact it's probably quite common. Which means that he's basically lying to 990 of the 1000 people he's supposedly following. (That's what I was getting at in the last two paragraphs of the article).
July 29th, 2011 at 5:13 am
What do you say about Harry's method of buying Twitter followers? Is that way a good way to promote your website / product? Harry claimed that he has surpassed the number of Twitter followers for all his competitors. But how does that translate into marketing success?
January 15th, 2013 at 2:51 pm
[...] is, you may have posted to Twitter or Facebook, but you can’t be sure if your message got (a) swallowed up by your followers’ streams on Twitter or (b) ignored entirely by Facebook’s [...]