Want to be popular on Twitter? There are plenty of people who claim they can help, but their tips rarely work and many of them are scammers. Now scientists have joined in, boiling down half a million tweets to a few simple rules for gaining a following.
C.J. Hutto (@cjhutto on Twitter) and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta examined the content and retweeting fate of tweets sent by 500 non-celebrities over a 15-month period. They looked for 2800 terms that convey positive and negative emotions, including slang and swear words, a set of emoticons and common acronyms, like LOL.
By giving each term a score on a sliding scale of positivity they were able to assess whether Twitter users who used each term gained or lost followers. The keys to success, they found, were to tweet positive messages, write clearly and retweet interesting titbits of news.
People who tweeted mostly about themselves didn't fare so well. "Twitter is used quite heavily as a news medium," Hutto says. "My weak connections on Twitter care less about what I had for breakfast than they do about this neat bit of news I discovered."
Know your audience
Previous studies had suggested that following "important" people like celebrities and getting them to follow you back, alongside the frequency and timing of tweets were key factors in upping your number of followers. But the team's study suggests it's what's in your tweets, rather than who you follow, that has the biggest impact on the size of your Twitter audience.
How engaged people are with their followers also matters. "Twitter users who engage with their existing followers via mentions, replies and favouriting had positive follower growth, while users who mostly broadcast to no one in particular had dramatically suppressed growth rates," says Hutto.
Readability was also key. The team constructed a "Tweet Reading Difficulty Index" to measure how understandable the tweets were. Those whose tweets scored higher on the index had more followers.
"When deciding whether or not to follow a virtual stranger, we found Twitter users seek out well-written over poorly written content," says Hutto. "People rely on linguistic cues like spelling and vocabulary to compensate for the lack of traditional contextual cues available in face-to-face settings."
The researchers will present their findings at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris, France, in April.
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