The Reach of a Twitter Post
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There is a belief that the number of followers is the critical factor on Twitter. The reasoning is that the person with the largest number of followers has the largest ’soapbox’.
That might not be true.
Let’s use this hypothetical example. If a person has a hundred thousand (100,000) followers, at first blush, that may seem impressive. However, the number of people who actually read the twitter post is only a faction of that number. And, depending on the content of the twitter post, the thought posted may or may not be passed along (’ReTweeted’).
Compare this with someone who only has a thousand (1,000) followers. The initial assumption is that the number of followers would limit this person’s ‘voice’. Nevertheless, if the content of the post is significant, perhaps seven people will pass along the twitter thought. And, if there are seven other people who see the thought from the ReTweet and pass it along, there is a pyramid effect. If this trend of seven people passing along significant content reaches six levels, the reach exceeds a hundred thousand (100,000) people.
The conclusion may be that it is significant measure of the soapbox is not just the mere measure of followers. Meaningful content matters - it always has.
Catherine Forsythe
2 Comments
Hotrao
June 24th, 2009
at 3:28am
I agree on this point.
In my opinion sometimes, like this one, big numbers are appealing but misleading: it’s more meaningful to have fewer followers but counted right than a pyramid of cascaded followers.
This also because information meaning, consistency and “weight” changes (honestly not only decreasing) through different levels of cascading (or retweeting).
Good content counts more than number of followers, because enables the potential of pyramid sharing.
The numbers of Twitter and communication overflow « How I see the world
June 24th, 2009
at 3:39am
[...] The numbers of Twitter and communication overflow Catherine Forsythe at Lockergnome http://www.lockergnome.com/forsythe/auth…) writes a good article on the real weight that should be given to numbers presented in Twitter (full article at http://www.lockergnome.com/forsythe/2009/06/23/the-reach-of-a-twitter-post/). [...]