Crastinate

I’ve written previously about the so-called influence that is perceived based on how many followers one has on Twitter. I got some comments by “popular” Twitter users that a 1 to 1 ratio of followers to followed does not mean that they are not influential (I was claiming the opposite). These conversations made me wonder how many Twitter users out there follow someone who follows them or as I like to call them, Twitter whores. The reason for the crude name is that in the Twitterverse, we use the follow button to denote who we like and who we don’t. It’s, in some sense, the currency of the Twitter economy. And these people give it away way too easily.

So I decided to do a quick, very unstatistical, Twitter social experiment. I created a Twitter username and went to the list of followers for one of the very popular Twitter users, Kevin Rose. I went down the list and signed up to follow 2000 people, the maximum Twitter will allow. I was curious to see how many people would follow me in return for no reason other than I followed them. Here were my results:

People I followed: 2000
People who blocked me: 4
People who followed me: 309
People who direct messaged me to thank me for following them: 59
Percentage of people following me of those that I follow: 15.45%

I understand that my experiment is not statistically viable at all. But still, 15%! That’s pretty high. And I wouldn’t be surprised that if I was selective on who I followed (I randomly selected and even chose people who were private) this number might be close to 30%.

Basically, this experiment says nothing other than that there are a lot of Twitter whores. Not that I’m knocking them. They provide a valuable service to those people who can’t gain followers on their own. Thank you Twitter whores. You’ve been providing users the fake impression that they’re popular since Twitter began (I’m practing for the next Budweiser ‘we salute you’ radio commercial).

Ely Rosenstock