The Follow Frenzy Experiment
Posted: February 2nd, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »How to increase followers is a much talked about topic surrounding Twitter, and most companies would agree they would like to see there following increase to a figure that’s nicer on the eyes! – So here at Whadda Media we thought we would run a cheeky Twitter experiment of our own…
The Experiment
‘Follow 1000 sector relevant people’
Why?
To discover whether following 1000 people, would generate a sufficient amount of accounts following back!
Factors of the Study
Anyone can follow a 1000 people and get some sort of response, however, there a certain aspects to this strategy that will affect the response and outcome. Listen carefully…
Follows must be sector relevant
We don’t need to stress the obvious, by following sector relevant people there is a much higher chance they will return the favour.
We are a digital marketing platform that helps companies manage their social media; therefore any account that we follow, would include interests like ‘digital marketing’, or ‘social media’ within their bio and tweets.
Twitter Account must already have some followers, relevant tweets & a bio
If you’re starting from scratch with something like 0-50 followers, and you’ve only tweeted a few times, it’s notable that your ‘follow back’ percentage, will not increase as much an established twitter page. Therefore, make sure your account has some relevant tweets, and 50 followers minimum, this way people will view your company as ‘professional’ and follow you back.
Make sure you don’t underestimate your Bio! You must strategically write your copy, as it sums you up as a company and as an account – it’s often what people judge you on, before deciding to follow you back.
Our profile before we started:
Accounts must continue to tweet throughout the experiment
Throughout the ‘follow frenzy’ you must continue to tweet. If people are looking at your profile and they see you don’t tweet at least once a day, the chances that they will follow you back slims dramatically. We recommend that the average professional account should tweet at least 5 times a day minimum.
Method
- Follow 1000 sector relevant accounts in the fastest possible time.
- Measure the results after 24 hours, remembering to tweet throughout.
- Measure the total amount of followers after 48 hours and un-follow those who didn’t follow back
The News
So, did it work, and was it worthwhile you’re wondering?
To give you a rough idea of the experiment time, it took us around 1 hour 30 minutes, between two members of staff to follow 1000 accounts.
Here were the results:
We received 143 unique followers in 24 hours and totalled 159 followers in 48 hours.
Start: 250 Followers End: 409 Followers
Start: 315 Following End: 1239 Following
Start: Tweets 208 End: 227 Tweets
Interestingly out of the 159 new followers gained, 95 (59%) were not accounts that we initially followed for the test, therefore indicating only 65 (41%) of new followers, were profiles that we initially followed! Nuts!
Our Account after the experiment
Our Website Hits
Not only did our follow count rise, but because our Twitter bio includes the link to our website, we generated over 1000 hits to our site in over the 48 hours.
Did you notice something?
We didn’t quite manage to follow 1000 people. We followed 923 and then Twitter told us we had reached a following limit!
Woops…so apparently this strategy is technically against the rules of Twitter. According to the social networking site ‘aggressive following’ is a breech of the rules. You are only allowed a 2000 people follow limit, and you can’t follow more accounts until more are following you. It seems that Twitter also counts if you followed and un-followed an account!
Summary
We would definitely recommend undertaking this experiment to get a quick boost in your followers. The underlying moral to story, however, isn’t that if you follow people, they will follow back.
The key to success on twitter, is ‘follow few and often’ and make them ‘sector relevant’, this should steadily increase your followers and ensure you’re not kicked off Twitter!
Hope this helped!
