★ My Mostly Stagnant Twitter Following

When I arrived in San Francisco, I had 800 followers. Withing the first month, I had acquired 1,000. The growth continued but it became stagnant. Believe it or not, I had peaked at 3,800 around September of 2009 (just 1.5 years after moving to the bay area). I did an experiment that I very much considered complete bs but if it did work out, I’d post a blog about it.

Read this post, “TweetBlocker. I’m not as Cool Now but it’s So Worth it!

I had been hovering around 3,800 followers for a while with very little growth. After running TweetBlocker, I ended up with under 3,000. So I lost 800 that day. Since then, I’ve been gaining followers back. The funny thing is, I haven’t gone beyond 3,800. Very odd. The thing is, this graph tells a different story:

6 Months of Twitter Follower Data

According to 6 months of follower data, I’ve gone from 3,600 followers to 3,825 in 6 months. This is a far stretch from the “I’ve been stuck” argument I gave but let’s look at that growth from 3,750 to 3,825. See the slow down that happened?

*Of note, see that jump in October? That was during Blogworld. Networking in person will gain you more followers*

One thing to say is that the amount of new followers I’ve gained since moving is incredibly low. There are two ideas on why but I won’t really test either of these.

  • I’m tweeting less. The less you tweet, the slower you gain followers. Conversations and “relevant tweets” to current events & tech will get you more followers quickly
  • I am no longer living in the epicenter of tech so my social relevance as an “expert” has dropped. This doesn’t bother me one bit. Just my hypothesis for why I’ve stopped gaining new followers

What’s interesting is each day I check Twitter for new followers (since new follower notifications are disabled), I see 5-10 new followers on average yet TwitterCounter’s Fancy Interactive Graph shows an average of +2 followers a day. Some days I lose 5 or gain 5 but rarely are there 7 day stretches where my audience consistently grows.

I’m not concerned but the fact that I hover at 3,800 followers on both occasions makes me think it’s a glitch. Twitter employees that follow me will say that’s bullshit and I’ll agree.  So what is it? I really think it’s coincidence because there is one other theory that I think will prevail.

Twitter is killing spam accounts more often and combing out spammers far more accurately than before.

In the past, Twitter killed spam accounts in batches. It happened every few months. I wrote about it before:

I think a lot of people deal with it because on those random occasions that Twitter purges known spam / bot accounts, people complain heavily about losing followers. “wahhhhh i lost 250 followers!!” I’ll check TwitterCounter.com and yep everyone lost a few hundred followers so it’s going to be okay, I promise.

Things have obviously changed. There’s no huge drop in the past 6 months but there are days when I lose 1-5 followers which is about how many followers I get out of the new 10 followers each day that I think are spam. I get 10 followers, half are spam, twitter takes care of half of them automatically within a few hours/days/weeks.

The result is I lose a few real followers (people that tire of my crap) and lose a lot of spam followers constantly and often, I didn’t get enough new followers that day to replace the once that left (tear) and those that were killed (die spammer!). I am not taking this personally (other than to write a 600 word post about it) but I guess I’m hoping to find some others in this situation.

Thanks for reading :)

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