Data Shows That Self-Reference Does Not Get Followers

“What I found here is pretty clear, accounts that have more followers do not tend to talk about themselves much. Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.”

Dude, come on, correlation is not causation. Its pretty interesting data, but your just making an assumption here.

“What I found here is pretty clear, accounts that have more followers do not tend to talk about themselves much. Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.”

Dude, come on, correlation is not causation. Its pretty interesting data, but your just making an assumption here.

“What I found here is pretty clear, accounts that have more followers do not tend to talk about themselves much. Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.”

Dude, come on, correlation is not causation. Its pretty interesting data, but your just making an assumption here.

At the risk of being self-referential, I just posted a blog entry about the commoditization of Twitter followers, in which I referenced a relevant study that differentiated between “Meformers” and “Informers” (and their respective median numbers of followers) … I also include a couple of links to posts on this blog. Anyhow, I'll include the relevant excerpt from the study below:

In a paper to be presented at CSCW 2010, Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams, Mor Naaman (@informor) and his colleagues analyzed the tweetstreams of 350 randomly selected users, and distinguish between Meformers – Twitter users who tend to share information about themselves, e.g., “tired and upset” – and Informers – users who share information on other people, places and things, typically including a URL – and report that Informers tend to have more friends [= followees] (Median=131) and followers (Median=112) than Meformers (Median=61, Median=42). I do not believe they included any celebrities in their dataset, but suspect some celebrities would represent outliers for the Meformer category.

At the risk of being self-referential, I just posted a blog entry about the commoditization of Twitter followers, in which I referenced a relevant study that differentiated between “Meformers” and “Informers” (and their respective median numbers of followers) … I also include a couple of links to posts on this blog. Anyhow, I'll include the relevant excerpt from the study below:

In a paper to be presented at CSCW 2010, Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams, Mor Naaman (@informor) and his colleagues analyzed the tweetstreams of 350 randomly selected users, and distinguish between Meformers – Twitter users who tend to share information about themselves, e.g., “tired and upset” – and Informers – users who share information on other people, places and things, typically including a URL – and report that Informers tend to have more friends [= followees] (Median=131) and followers (Median=112) than Meformers (Median=61, Median=42). I do not believe they included any celebrities in their dataset, but suspect some celebrities would represent outliers for the Meformer category.

At the risk of being self-referential, I just posted a blog entry about the commoditization of Twitter followers, in which I referenced a relevant study that differentiated between “Meformers” and “Informers” (and their respective median numbers of followers) … I also include a couple of links to posts on this blog. Anyhow, I'll include the relevant excerpt from the study below:

In a paper to be presented at CSCW 2010, Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams, Mor Naaman (@informor) and his colleagues analyzed the tweetstreams of 350 randomly selected users, and distinguish between Meformers – Twitter users who tend to share information about themselves, e.g., “tired and upset” – and Informers – users who share information on other people, places and things, typically including a URL – and report that Informers tend to have more friends [= followees] (Median=131) and followers (Median=112) than Meformers (Median=61, Median=42). I do not believe they included any celebrities in their dataset, but suspect some celebrities would represent outliers for the Meformer category.

Yeah. That sounds about right. Talk about yourself on facebook, I guess. Every time I mention anything about my personal life I lose followers.

Dan, Looking at your data… I’m wondering something. The less followers they have doesn’t necessarily mean that these accounts “lost members” or have low numbers because of using social language. Perhaps many of these accounts are just new accounts. I’d like to see a side by side of this graph and also the age of these accounts (might not be possible) I’d also be very interested to know if some of the larger accounts started out using self-reference to build a loyal following and then those members took care of the rest by word of mouth… and the account didn’t need to self-reference anymore. However, I do think your post makes a very good point. There’s no reason to follow someone on twitter if they’re not providing something useful to you. This doesn’t however mean that self-reference is a bad thing. If you’re self referencing yet adding something useful to the consumer (aka humor/a coupon code/a sale) then I don’t see how that could lose followers. However, if you’re simply telling them what you had for lunch that day… well then obviously your not going to keep many. Any thoughts on this? P.S. I agree with the post below… always got to remember correlation is never causation

If you talk rubbish, then of course you will always loose followers, whatever it is you write about. The best selling autobiographies are about interesting people, who have interesting things to say. Farcebook, twitter, etc are no different.

I'd like to play with the raw data because aside from a strong trend at one end of the scale the least lines regression I'm guessing would be fairly flat. I'm only judging that your chart is actually a scatter plot and going best fit by eye (on a screen no less) but you're best fit doesn't look so comfortable to me. That said I'm not disputing your conclusions.

This is very interesting, although I think you might be jumping too easily to the conclusion “Want more followers? Stop talking about yourself.” on the assumption that people are following or unfollowing based on what you say. However it could be the other way around- you could be talking less about yourself as a *result* of having more followers- and therefore engaging in conversation with a greater number of people.

It's probably a bit of both, but it would be interesting if there was a way to determine how much is one direction, and how much the other.

hey thats a wonderful tip here..

had never realized that this could be the tip top twitter users might be using

thnks