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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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January 28th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“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.
January 28th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“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.
January 28th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“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.
January 28th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“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.
January 28th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“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.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:07 am
[...] seiner Untersuchung hat er die Zahl der Follower verschiedener Accounts in Abhängigkeit zu einer Vielzahl [...]
January 29th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
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.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
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.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
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.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
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.
January 29th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
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.
January 29th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Yeah. That sounds about right. Talk about yourself on facebook, I guess. Every time I mention anything about my personal life I lose followers.
January 29th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Yeah. That sounds about right. Talk about yourself on facebook, I guess. Every time I mention anything about my personal life I lose followers.
January 29th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Yeah. That sounds about right. Talk about yourself on facebook, I guess. Every time I mention anything about my personal life I lose followers.
January 30th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
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February 1st, 2010 at 6:38 pm
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.
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:18 pm
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.
February 4th, 2010 at 5:01 am
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
February 6th, 2010 at 7:59 am
hey thats a wonderful tip here..
had never realized that this could be the tip top twitter users might be using
thnks
February 9th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
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…
February 12th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
[...] series of TweetPsych based data points, this is based on analysis of over 100,000 accounts and looks at [...]
February 17th, 2010 at 10:07 am
[...] also like the notion that you get more followers if you stop talking about yourself. I especially like that there are charts, though it’s just a correlation as the commenters on [...]
June 26th, 2010 at 4:34 am
[...] data on more than 60,000 Twitter users, he looked at self-reference on Twitter. He found that Twitter users who don’t talk about themselves much tend to have more [...]
June 27th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
[...] TweetPsyche data on more than 60,000 Twitter users, he looked at self-reference on Twitter. He found that Twitter users who don’t talk about themselves much tend to have more [...]
July 5th, 2010 at 12:05 am
[...] data on more than 60,000 Twitter users, he looked at self-reference on Twitter. He found that Twitter users who don’t talk about themselves much tend to have more [...]
July 20th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
[...] juist met interactie? Niet voor niets wees iemand me twee weken geleden op twitter op de volgende blog: en daarachter aan las ik nog meer psycho-analyse van het [...]