by Rob Paterson
January 3, 2009 at 11:40 am
· Filed under Twitter
Doing more with less will be a goal of us all in 2009.
Twitter is going to help a lot of people to do more for less.
But how can you do this? Especially if you and/or your organization is new to the game? How can you get the reach that you will need to “see” what is really going on or get the help or information that you want?
A lot of the recent debate about Twitter has been about “Authority” who has the biggest megaphone. I won’t go into this except to say that what we know about social networks tells that it will be less about you and more about your inner circle.
It will not be essential for you to be the A lister nor will you have to have thousands of followers
Stowe Boyd has a powerful intuition about these things. His gut feel is that there is a sweet spot of about 100 in your Twitter group that gives you the best ROI – Time and Effort versus return.
I have suggested for a longtime that to ‘get’ Twitter you need to follow 100 people at least, for several weeks. This cursory recitation of stats suggests that there are thousands of users out there happily communing with a handful of friends. I don’t buy it. I bet most of those accounts with small use, small links, and small time online represent a fringe of uninvolved people who aren’t getting much value from the service, if they login in at all. The sweet spot is far north of the center of some bell curve, I believe.
The real analysis of meaningful trands will have to wait, but here’s some cross tabs that would be interesting:
- What’s the distribution of perceived value? Does more use translate into higher perception of utility? My bet is yes.
- What’s the distribution of use? Do people with few connections use the service less? My bet is yes.
- Do people gain more followers based on hours online, and numbers of Tweets? I bet yes.
- Where is the magic dropout number? A lot of users abandon services like Twitter, but I bet that once you have a network of size N, the likelihood of dropping out decreases dramatically. What is N?
Here’s a nasty freehand drawing of what I am suggesting:
On the left, the vertical access is some formula based on an aggregation or ratio of following, followers, numbers of tweets, relies, direct messages, time spent usign the tool, etc. The horizontal access represents perceived utility. I have drawn the utility curve as being exponential, but it may actually be more of an S curve, with utility tapering off after some psychological maximums have been reached.
Valdis Krebs goes further. In his view – it is the quality of your immediate circle that gives you the reach. He tells me that he follows 70 and agrees with Stowe that the sweet spot may be 100.
In a simple view of Twitter we may think that it is all up to us – this is how Valdis shows this idea:
This is the current reality I think of most pre 2.0 organizations – they have to use huge resources to get their message out or intelligence back from this perspective.
Here is Valdis’s view of the leveraged ecosystem that Twitter enables:
All the leverage comes from the system itself. Here is his summary that fits Stowe’s experience too
So, if many of the social circles above are already interconnected do I have follow an individual in each social circle/community on Twitter? Probably not. The trick is to find the people that reach many social circles and follow them. Of course, we need to find more than the minimum of people to follow — you want some redundancy in your network so that there are multiple paths to places of interest for you. Finding these key nodes is what social network analysis is all about.
And this is why I follow so few people on Twitter! For the time invested, I want maximum return. I use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people that give me the same access as following someone in every group. Follow the few to reach the many!
Because I have chosen them carefully, I want to actually read the tweets of the people I follow. A small part of my “following network” is always in churn, but the number of people I follow on Twitter never exceeds 100. Those who follow thousands of people readily admit that they can not read the fire hose of tweets they get every day.
Can we be more precise? Can we know the nature of this “sweet spot”? I think we can and I bet that it is found in the Fibonacci sequence. Here are the numbers that support Stowe and Valdis that I posted back in April of 2008. I have posited that the Fibonacci sequence may give us the answers becuase it is the sequence that nature uses in ALL systems when seeking the most effective distribution.
So here is the data – based on the early part of the Fibonacci sequence and where I have assumed that the Circle of Influence may be to the Power of 4.
So a circle of 8 – the ideal Trusted Space – can attract, affect and influence 4,096 people. If I have 144 in my circle we can reach just over 400 million others. BUT my bet is that just as the reach goes up, the gravitational pull goes down.
2 – 16
3 – 82
5 – 625
8 – 4,096
13 – 28,561
34 – 1,336,336
55 – 9,150, 625
89 – 62, 742,241
144 – 429, 981, 696
Notice anything? As we look at the sequence we see a Pareto or power curve – it’s the Long Tail.
So what do I also “see”?
I think that there are two power curves here. One is reach and the other is power or gravity.
The greatest gravitational pull is at 2 – the most effective reach is 144. There is likely a “sweet spot” along the curve where reach and pull are best found in concert. My bet is that it is in using the circles of 8 – 13 – 34. You can reach more than a million people with 34 and you can really attract 4,096 powerfully at 4.
If my intuition is correct, then the full power of social software might be revealed as we explore these numbers and their meaning. Does this not put a new face on marketing? Does it tell us how we will find and attach to content in a universe of infinite content? Does this say something about how to organize anything?
We are just starting to see the power of Twitter and I think it is that a very modest investment in your time in effect opens up the world to you. The 1.- world was based on brute force. This brute force was money. It, like a team engine looked impressive but was very inefficient.
Twitter’s tight connection to the reality of our social networks will I think unlock an entirely new opportunity to get messages out and in that will help all of us – from people like me who work alone at home to the largest of organizations.
If you want to check out the nature of your network – Twitter Friends is very easy and helpful.
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I really like your post. I have been using a tool that I created to follow people in target markets from twellow. I’ve maxed out at the standard 2,000 you’re able to follow cap before you can match that in your followers and I have gained about 600 followers from it myself.
The only thing is that, as you pointed at, keeping up with all of those people and trying to interact with all of them is really a hassle and distracting. Sure, I can “cull” my users to only follow those people who follow me, but as my follower list grows, that means that eventually I’ll just be following 2,000 people again. It seems the solution for me is to do further cuts to my list, but this time, only follow the people who have responded to me in replies or direct messages. I especially want to keep the people who have RTed (re-tweeted or re posted) my messages to their followers because I think that will allow me to really cash in on your ideas.
If you’re correct (which I think you are), that means I should be able to get the same amount of reach, and the same amount of people coming to my website from twitter as I am getting now, with much less noise going on, and the ability to further deepen the relationships I’ve already built with a good focus.
I’ll let you know how it plays out 
I think Twitter represents a new “Tipping Point” in the use of the internet for real-time communications. In just a short while, I’ve “met” a significant number of people who have the same interests as me. It points to a new mode of communication that I think is “here to stay” and it represents the “instant gratification” of online communications. Send it to your cell or email, it works the same.
Nathanial
I find using Tweetdeck helps me differentiate my followers – I rank by real friends – not many – people who also share keen interests – and events
So I have a gradient with all the noise stripped out but room for the unusual
Rob
Deborah – I have been surprised at how many new people I have met by using Twitter that I really have got to like – a lot.
Also – working from home – has given me a social relief that was not possible before
Robert, what’s your twitter account?
It’s http://twitter.com/robpatrob
I’m one of those people that started using twitter and then stopped because I didn’t get it. I personally have little desire to follow friends old or new but as an online marketer I can’t help but feel the need to “get it”…
My question: This article seems to suggest that if you tweet someone then it somehow goes out to all of their network as well? I didnt realise this is the case?? If person A follow person B follows person C and person C makes a tweet, does person A receive it?
Also isnt a lot of its power in its “fad-ness”? If you use it as a marketing tool than its essential no different than RSS or email except that its perceived to be way cooler and hence everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.
What am I missing?
-HKS
Hari
I think it has moved beyond fad now.
I think that the core idea here is Trust. I think that Twitter is an extension of the main way that Primates create trust and social cohesion – grooming – We started by physical grooming as apes and monkeys still do. This is very expensive – it demands one of one physical proximity.
Dunbar’s theory is that our use of language is an extension of grooming – but now man could keep his hands free and extend the distance. Dunbar believes that language came from grooming and hence gossip.
Twitter seems to be like this. Better cohesion is achieved not by your or mine brilliant epithets or ideas on Twitter but through our personal revelation. The optimal route to getting a close knit group of trusting followers is to “groom” – be nice and responsive and personal with others.
With a trusted group when you then ask for a favour or information, they will do their best to get back to you.
Because say my closest 30 friends all have out of their own 30 25 who are different and each of them another 25 who are different and so on – your request to one trusted friend can move quickly through a vast network of trust.
The marketing revolution is to have friends, real ones, talking to friends not strangers to strangers.
In about 2 weeks I will have finished the aFst Forward Blog Book on Twitter where hoefully I will do a better job than this in explaining this – how am I doing so far?
@Robert Patterson, you’re doing pretty good… I’m trying to map and learn this system as well… It’s an interesting concept. Almost like having your own street team, but the street in question is actually instant connections between people that are traversed. I’ve made one system for trying to map how the word gets out through following RT posts… and using that as a measurement of the network strength. If you want to talk about it, use my website’s contact form (website not related to this research, but use the form on the contact page… don’t want to give my e-mail over this or any site)
@Hari Karam Singh: Actually, person A does not receive this tweet. what rob is pointing to is that people will use their close network to get your message out. It’s not a matter of direct interconnectedness… the only way person A and person C can see eachothers messages is if person B talks with either person A or person C on a regular basis. For instance… if I follow you, and I see you having an interesting convo with Robert (I know because you have to reply to his name @Robert in this example)… then I can see Robert in your “tweetstream” and click on him to get the other part of the conversation. I might also read some of his other stuff to see who he is. And I might even follow him if I think that he would be a good contact for me.
It seems to me though, from this article that I shouldn’t be worried about following @Robert (from the example) because you’re already his trusted friend. And since we trust each other, I can have you talk to Robert for me since I’m really just a stranger. The view I see from this article is that if you use Twitter more like real life, and not just like some way to spam people, then you can really get a much bigger following, and also a much wider response to your links you want people to see (your blog, etc.)
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FrancisJanuary 14th, 2009 at 2:19 am |
This is quite interesting. I've always wondered how people could manage to follow thousands of people on Twitter without going insane. 100 followers is much more manageable and actually gives you a chance to develop relationships with your circle. Thanks for pointing it out!
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