Twitter: Do Followers Equal Influence?

So? What do you think?

Ok, I think we already know that by certain measures, the answer is no.

The Harvard Business Review highlighted a study showing that the more followers you have doesn’t indicate how much influence you have with each follower.

That is, if you have a million followers and send out a tweet, a given follower of yours isn’t any more likely to retweet you than if it had come from someone with 100 followers.

But that’s not really what I’m asking. I just want to know about eyeballs. I mean, if you have 600 followers, and you post a link, how many actual people click that link?

I got curious, so I had a look at what has happened when people have tweeted a link to this blog. I looked at two tweets.

  • Person A has about 650 followers
  • Person B has about 550 followers

Since they tweeted the link, I assume that they thought it would be of interest to their followers. Ready for the data?

No one clicked.

Yes, out of about a thousand people (assuming some overlap in the tech comm industry), not a single person came to this blog from Twitter (or any Twitter client) on either of those two days.

Is anyone else really surprised by this? Or is this exactly what you expected?

See:

Harvard Business Review Article: On Twitter, Followers Don’t Equal Influence

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