Data Shows That Self-Reference Does Not Get Followers

Posted on Jan 28th, 2010
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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.

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View Comments to “Data Shows That Self-Reference Does Not Get Followers”

  1. Joe Hall Says:

    “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.

  2. Joe Hall Says:

    “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.

  3. Joe Hall Says:

    “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.

  4. Joe Hall Says:

    “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.

  5. Joe Hall Says:

    “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.

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

    [...] seiner Untersuchung hat er die Zahl der Follower verschiedener Accounts in Abhängigkeit zu einer Vielzahl [...]

  7. Joe McCarthy Says:

    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.

  8. Joe McCarthy Says:

    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.

  9. Joe McCarthy Says:

    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.

  10. Joe McCarthy Says:

    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.

  11. Joe McCarthy Says:

    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.

  12. Jorge Mir Says:

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

  13. Jorge Mir Says:

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

  14. Jorge Mir Says:

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

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  16. lordmatt Says:

    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.

  17. alephnaughtpix Says:

    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.

  18. Carri Bugbee Says:

    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

  19. Raj Says:

    hey thats a wonderful tip here..

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

    thnks :)

  20. Marketing Real Estate - Making You Findable Says:

    Dan Zarrella and Self Reference…

    On Dan Zarrella’s blog today we were looking at a new post talking about self reference and  followers. Basically, what you see in the chart below and the link to his post  is when people are on twitter or on any other social network the way to g…

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