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…

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

thnks

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

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.

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.

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.