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Comment by johns | Hacker News Reader

Max misappropriates value from follower count. He says that the new followers that were valuable were "real business men with high follower to followee counts" (um, spammers?) and that the second article got him followers that were "unimportant people with low follower counts"

This is backwards. Get those first kind of people to follow you and they may retweet your stuff once in a blue moon but it's just noise amongst the rest of their noise. Get a lot of that second group to follow you and those people will GO TO BAT for you. They're real, engaged followers. Your tweets are far more likely to register with them (or even just be seen) and they can just as easily start network effects that reach the big boys anyway. As a whole they're far more valuable than 1000 of the 'real business men'.

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Excellent point. Twitter accounts with moderate followers represent real people that are more likely to be engaged with your tweets. The "big boys" are more likely to be using Twitter as a broadcasting marketing tool. The former group are more likely to become your users/readers/customers.

I think the most valuable twitter user is he who followers 100 people but is followed by 10.000 people. Do you disagree?

That depends on the 10,000 people. If they're all outside the demographic that I'm interested in or if the person that follows me never retweets stuff that interests my demographic then it's useless.

In general though, assuming there is some bond between you and the person that follows 100 people and the 10,000 people that follow him in turn contain some real live bodies that are in the right demographic he/she will be a useful follower.

Personally I have not seen much action on twitter from people with 10's of thousands of followers, they are usually fairly reluctant to re-tweet unless it suits them perfectly, exactly because of their large following, and also because people with that many followers usually have those for their own glorification and not specifically as a tool to communicate with people with who they have a strong (2 way) bond.

That's quite interesting. I don't actually know how that works since I've obviously never had more than 200 followers. I see the point though - I have revised my opinion hereforth.

As a "reader" on Twitter I usually dont follow anyone over a few hundred followers unless they are really interesting. Because mostly it is just noise.

I suspect the demographic of their followers isn't hugely useful for "sticky" readers.

According Duncan Watts' research[1] the crucial factor in spreading a trend is how susceptible the population is to persuasion, not how persuasive the first person to start it is.

You chose themes that your chosen population was already very susceptible to passing on.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point...

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