A few months ago I noticed more than 1,000 people I followed on Twitter did not follow me on my @ErickWrites account. I also noticed many of those people followed very few people.
They are the people who have thousands of followers, but only follow a couple hundred people. They are the people who follow a couple hundred people and only a couple hundred people follow them. They are the people who tweet tens of thousands of times to anyone or no one about anything or nothing. Or they are the people who rarely Tweet.
Social Media works according to the Connectivity Principle. It is a set of observations of how people connect. This blog focuses on Twitter, but the Connectivity Principle applies to social media in general.
Here are my observations of how the Connectivity Principle applies to Twitter:
- The more followers you have the higher the chances someone you follow will follow you
- The more followers you have the higher the chance someone you don’t follow will follow you
- The more often you follow people who follow you the more people will follow you
- Unfollowing or not following inactive accounts will allow you to follow a higher number of active accounts
- The more active accounts you follow, the more people will follow you
- The more often you tweet, retweet, mention people, etc the more people will follow you
- The more often you tweet, retweet, mention people, etc the more people will thank you, mention you, retweet you, etc
- The less a person follows other people the less chance there is that person will follow you
- The lower the proportion of tweets to follower/following ratio, the less chance that person will follow you
- The ratio of the above depends on how many people follow you
- Until you reach 5,000 followers you are limited to the number of people you can follow, but anyone can list up to 10,000 accounts
- The more you list people, they more they will list you. And the more list you appear on, the more exposure you will get
- Buying Twitter followers will inflate your numbers, but it will not give you quality followers (and it’s against Twitter’s TOS)
- The less frequently a person posts on Twitter the more likely they won’t follow you
- A person whose Tweets are based largely around the subject matter as yours is more likely to follow you.
- People are more likely to follow you if you Tweet quality Tweets (That doesn’t mean every tweet has to be about your main topic. It mean if it includes a link to an article or blog, that article or blog should be high quality.) @MarinOrlosky of @Testloft reminded me of this very obvious one that I forgot.
Adding rules to Social Media’s Connectivity Principle would be like adding rules to the law of gravity. Pointless! We can only observe it and abide by the principles of our observations.
Do you have any other observations to add to how the Connectivity Principle applies to Twitter? Do you have any observations of how the Connectivity Principle applies to Facebook, Google Plus, or other social media sites?
Stay social my friends!
Erick
