A Scientific Approach to... Gaining Twitter Followers?

themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com

30 points·robertjmoore··7 comments

A study of ten separate follower acquisition techniques, complete with "cost per follower" metrics and a discussion of how follower value varies across each technique

Open articleView on HN

Interesting experiment. I'm a purist at heart, though, and all this talk of accreting followers as a business process makes me ache a little. I still think this is the best way to go: http://increaseyourtwitterfollowers.com/

Excuse my naivete (I'm not a Twitter user), but what is the purpose of artificially inflating your number of followers without tweeting anything interesting? Are there straightforward ways to monetize this solely based on your number of followers?

The only apparent win is that if you inflate your follower count to something beyond 1000, you may be incrementally more likely to pick up followers because of the credibility win of having lots of followers.

Other than that, it's probably a completely retarded strategy.

http://twitterisnotacompetition.com

The article started with a good premise, but then the initial results were abysmal (7 followers for 20 minutes of work).

So the article switched to reviewing pay-to-follow services, which bring 0 value to your twitter account.

I would have been more interested in a scientific study of the growth curve, using famous and well-established accounts, rather than anecdotal experiments.

Anybody that uses any website where people can 'friend' you (facebook, twitter, etc) to maximize their number of 'friends' really doesn't get it.

Honestly, I think if you need to "Try" to get more twitter followers you are: 1) not interesting enough for people to follow you on their own accord. 2) doing it wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com