Data Shows that Negative Remarks Lead to Fewer Followers

Hi Dan,

The data shows a correlation between negative comments and fewer followers but it does not reveal a causal relationship. Is it that people with fewer followers make more negative comments or that negative comments lead to fewer followers? or something else?

My hypothesis is that people who have little skill in developing relationships are also less happy hence you will find more negative comments amongst those with fewer followers.

The straightline trendline is also problematic because the uneven spread of users – decreasing as followership increases – means the data at the large following end is less reliable, hence the shape of the graph. Putting that aside a better fit would be a power curve.

Thanks for the chart Dan; I'd be interested to see a follow-up post detailing methodology/context, because while of course people like @scobleizer and @guykawasaki and @zappos tend to be generally positive, I would suspect that there are plenty (especially in the entertainment sphere) who use negativity for comedic effect. Also, did you end the graph at ~8k followers because of insufficient sample size above that? I know little about statistics, so pardon me if for such reasons @aplusk and so forth can't be included, but that's unfortunate because those folks have such a significant influence on the medium.

Also, I have to agree with Alex's point about correlation ≠ causation. Now of course nuanced, qualified statements like “Data show correlation between negativity and fewer followers) are not the way to get pageviews and retweets, sadly (I think the internet encourages sloppy logic), but coming from someone who calls himself a scientist, that sort of semantic fudgery is disappointing.

But hey, if a bunch of casual retweeters conclude from this that they should be more cheerful on Twitter, I suppose the world's a better place.

Great to see that yours comments sound more and more like an academic seminar. Because we are there, let's adress causality: try to work with a unfollowing tracker to see what were the latest comments before someone goes away. (And try to compare that with how was mentionned someone getting new followers.)

I'd love to have more categories in “negative”: sad, bitching, dark humour, etc. I'm assuming that twitter offers statistically significant proportion of each of those — hence my surprise to see the jagged line. You might want to pool twitterers by categories, especially beyond 4000 followers, to smooth out the curve — and use a log-scale to match. I'd love to see ratio of negative, negative to positive, and total number of negative twits — or at least you saying which is most significant.

Tweets a very different from Emails which are very different from Facebook.

So; regardless of the emotion associated with the message or webpage, the platform in that peeps read the msg. will determine what is acceptable for emotional messages…

I find whenever I send out an email about Mike Dillard I get more click than anything. I've even sent out free ebooks (that I wrote) to my list and had zero clicks to it (and it provides REAL value), but no one found the ebook in the first place. Then on the same day my Mike Dillard emails were clicked like crazy.

Sometimes I feel like using the Internet to share my knowledge and excitement is a popularity contest.

I'm in the same boat on this one… I like the idea and it makes a whole lot of sense to me, but almost too much sense. Of course no one wants to be peppered by negative ideas all the time. But I am appreciative of the information to back it up.

we did platform that analyze Tweets constantly for certain phrase – like company name. Our analytical model takes into consideration 4.800+ sentiments describing emotions [not only bad ].

I do publish analysis for phrase 'Buzz' in my Google Buzz profile:
http://www.google.com/profiles/maciej.stachowia…

thanks for posting this, was really useful and interesting to me.