The Industry Review

Click on the image to see the full statistics

Ok.. the title is slightly misleading (only slightly). But you’ll have to forgive me for that.

 
As I’ve mentioned earlier in this blog, I like using TwitterCounter. It shows interesting statistics about my Twitter activities, not to mention, it can be used to manually update the number of followers that appear on the top right corner of this blog (otherwise it updates periodically).

 
In the past few days TwitterCounter seemed to have a few issues. I kept getting error messages whenever I tried to access it. Yesterday when I was eventually able to, it told me I have 26 followers. Pretty amusing – it brought me back in time to April 2009 (back when I did have 26 followers).

 
What I find particularly funny is that TwitterCounter hasn’t compensated for that. So according to the application’s logic, I gained more than 76,000 in a day.

 
Based on this rate, I will have 1,230,729 followers in 30 days. You think it might happen? I’m crossing my fingers! That would be SO awesome! 😀

Click on the image to see it in higher resolution

Everybody knows that interacting on Twitter attracts followers, right? This is the main reason for Twitter’s existence. As a long time active user, I can say: this is, of course, true – you can gain followers based on that alone (as I wrote about very early on).

 
With that being said, very active users know that if you tweet too much, it really hampers this process. There were periods where I was extremely active and tweeted as many as 400 tweets a day ( …see my article on Twitter Jail… ). I was well aware of the fact that if I tweet less, I will gain more followers. But gaining followers wasn’t what I was after, so I did what I wanted to do. If someone didn’t want to follow me because I talked too much, then there’s nothing I can do about it – I’m not going to change myself.

 
In the past two months I’ve drastically reduced my Twitter activities. Not to change the subject, but the main reason is that I’m busy and simply can’t afford the time. There is also another big reason, which I may dedicate a post to, but can’t discuss at the moment.

 
However, watch the above graph (click here to see it in higher resolution) – a new feature, I believe – courtesy of TwitterCounter. It shows my number of tweets and followers over a three month time period. I really like this feature.

 
As you can see, there is no correlation at all between the number of followers I gained every day and the number of tweets I tweeted. I was aware of it, of course, but it’s nice to see it visualized.

 
The truth is, while interacting and being active – in moderation – really helps getting followers, it is entirely unnecessary. One does not need to be active at all to gain followers. How? That’s a story for another time. I am aware of several users who don’t tweet at all whose Twitter growth is extremely fast.

 
Twitter may not like this fact, but that is the case. In fact, in many ways they encourage this by setting artificial limits on tweets and DMs (again I mention my post on Twitter Jail) and other issues. Hopefully this will change in the future.

I’ve been slow to update my blog lately. Lots of family issues to take care that have been distracting me, and worse, kind of prevent me from being able to write cheerful posts (which is what I intend to write next, hopefully today or tomorrow). But this is something I wanted to share first:

 
I always see people measuring their Twitter follower growth using TwitterCounter. In fact, I have done this too in a previous post.

 
That being said, I recently found out that the TwitterGrader has a much better growth chart. It appears to be virtually real time, much more accurate, and easier to access. Although I highly disagree with their grading algorithm (..which I mentioned here..), their charting method is top notch. In fact, here’s my chart.

 
Isn’t it interesting? You could tell I tried different approaches in my Twitter follower attraction by the various patterns.

 
But a picture is worth a thousand words. Just look at the differences between the two charting methods I mentioned:

 

Chart Using TwitterGrader

Chart Using TwitterCounter