Data Shows That Self-Reference Does Not Get Followers

Jan 28th 2010 View Comments




If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

Following up on my last post using TweetPsych Data, I looked at a metric opposing social behavior: self-reference. This time the dataset is well over 60,000 Twitter accounts.

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.

If you like this post, or any of my work, please, nominate me for a Shorty Award.

If you liked this post, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed or my email newsletter so you never miss the science.

Take this quick survey and tell me what social media data you'd like to see me analyze.

  • http://www.widerfunnel.com/ Chris

    It’s a interesting and intuitive indicator, Dan. Good work in simplifying the concept.

    On the same point, you may want to consider whether using 38% of the words (34 of 89 words) in the body of the post to ask for a Shorty nomination may have the same negative effect on your readership?

  • http://twitter.com/joehall Joe Hall

    “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.

  • http://twitter.com/joehall Joe Hall

    “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.

  • http://twitter.com/joehall Joe Hall

    “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.

  • http://twitter.com/joehall Joe Hall

    “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.

  • http://twitter.com/joehall Joe Hall

    “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.

  • Pingback: Twitter: Wer nicht immer nur über sich selbst spricht, dem hören mehr Leutchen zu | Basic Thinking Blog

  • http://www.johnthawley.com/ John Thawley

    This also assumes that “more followers” is the core mission. Is it? Does “more followers” translate to better results? What about relevant followers? Doesn’t that mean more?

    Just data… not necessarily a meaningful conclusion.

  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    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.

  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    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.

  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    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.

  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    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.

  • http://gumption.typepad.com Joe McCarthy

    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.

  • http://www.jorgemir.com Jorge Mir

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

  • http://www.jorgemir.com Jorge Mir

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

  • http://www.jorgemir.com Jorge Mir

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

  • http://www.thegiveproject.com/ Chase Brumfield

    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

  • milian

    latest music and photo gallery.
    bagla , hindi and english songs album download.

  • Harry Houdini

    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.

  • http://tommytoy.vox.com/ Tommy Toy

    ZARELLE, there is definitely something wrong with tweetpsych. How do you explain celebrity posts who post about themselves. “i’m at starbucks”, “i just got laid”, “just finished wrapping the movie”, etc. yet some of these celebrities have huge numbers of followers.

    In short, people want to know about you. Call that self-reference. Okay, I am guilty. I am not afraid to give an opinion, if you don’t like my opinion, at least offer a better solution. challenge me. if you want to drop me as a follower cause your silly ego or feelings were hurt, good bye.

    Sorry, but i disagree with your findings.

  • http://lordmatt.co.uk lordmatt

    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.

  • http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/ Mary Adams

    Could you please clarify the data? On the left-hand axis the data range from .65% to 1.3%. What does social language mean?

  • alephnaughtpix

    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.

  • http://twitter.com/CarriBugbee Carri Bugbee

    I think this all depends upon the type of account you're running and why people are following you. To be truly helpful, I think this data would need to be adjusted for sentiment, though that's still a bit of voodoo.

    Having ramped up and/or managed 40+ Twitter accounts in a wide variety of business categories, I have a sense of when you can get away with talking about yourself and when you can't.

    Anecdotally, I think that individual tweeters who are self-deprecating or talk about mishaps tend to engender support. Everyone likes an underdog and we all want to be helpful! But nobody likes a boaster.

    One of my biggest pet peeves is people who retweet other people’s retweets of their own tweets (for example, if I tweeted: RT @tweeter RT @CarriBugbee blah, blah, blah). I know many others who find this just as egregious, yet I still see so-called “experts” doing this to give themselves props.

    For businesses, talking about deals and promotions has become a generally accepted practice, as long as these tweets are interspersed with other useful information. Many people will only follow a brand for deals or customer service (the Razorfish study released in October 2009 confirmed this), so they expect brands to talk about themselves.

    @CarriBugbee
    Social Profiles: http://www.CarriBugbee.com

  • http://thepositivelife.com Raj

    hey thats a wonderful tip here..

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

    thnks :)

  • Pingback: Marketing Real Estate - Making You Findable

  • Pingback: What’s with the Negative Remarks. : code name max

  • Pingback: Quality of Followers | The LugIron Software Blog

  • Pingback: Better you than me | Wylie's Writing Tips

  • Pingback: July 2010 | In this issue | Wylie's Writing Tips

  • Pingback: Better you than me | Want more Twitter followers? Stop talking about yourself | Wylie Communications, Inc.

  • Pingback: Wat is het verschil tussen een column en een blog? | Kiki's Blog