When it comes to Twitter, what’s more important: a large list of followers or a small list of friends? I recently launched an experiment to take a qualitative look at Twitter followers and to help answer this question. My goal was to find out whether it makes more sense to just add/follow back thousands of people with little interaction, or to focus on a few friends but foster relationships with them. I used my main twitter account and one I created a few months ago to run the experiment and compare. My account is labeled “Friends”, and the other account is labeled “Followers”. Please keep in mind that this is a qualitative analysis – I only used 2 total accounts, testing just 12 links over the course of 10 days. In the future I’d hope to duplicate this experiment over a month’s time, testing many more links over a multitude of accounts.

So what did I find in this experiment? Well, my hypothesis was that with 4X the base of followers, the second account would certainly get more clickthroughs of links, but that the percentage of users clicking through would be higher for my @jaremy “Friends” account, and there would be higher interaction. I tested 12 links at 4 different time slots, Morning (before 12 PST), Lunch (12-2), Afternoon (2-6) and Night (6PM and later). I also categorized each link (Gaming, Misc, Personal, Tech). Here were my findings (all data analyzed using an Excel PivotTable because I’m an enormous dork):

1) Make friends, not followers. Period. Not only was return on interaction much higher (6.4% to 1.5%), but the “Friends” account even got more overall clicks than the “Followers account. As measured by daypart, Afternoon and Night had the smallest differential in percentage, but still received 2X the percentage of clicks on the Friends account.

2) It’s personal. The largest differential with regards to content type was a personal link I posted about a story I wrote on my college experience. On that post I got a whopping 23% of clickthroughs to my “Friends” account, versus less than 1% on the other account.

3) With followers, you have to scale BIG. To make significant enough gains, on an account filled with uninterested followers, you would have to have at least 4.5X the number of people following. So if you have an account with 1,000 followers, to market with an account with more *clicks*, you’d have to get 4,500 followers. Which begs the question: why not just interact and make more friends?
4) Friends have greater interaction, too. Over the course of this experiment, I had 10X the interactions (RTs + Replies) with my group of “Friends” than my group of “Followers”. Needless to say, if you have questions or need help or any sort of interaction, having Twitter friends is the way to go. And one of the big ways that I use Twitter is for that interaction.

Clearly the best solution for Twitter is to have thousands of friends, all of whom are interested in your content. But if it’s a choice between creating a huge list of followers and actually making connections, I hope this post helps you to use Twitter (and other social networks) in the right way.

Let me know what you thought of this experiment in the comments section. Any input would be appreciated, and if you’re interested in helping on a larger-scale experiment sometime in the future, feel free to contact me on Twitter or in the comments.

Edit: Click through the link at the bottom to see the results of the experiment.

Sometimes I’m curious to a fault. I’ve always been of the opinion and mindset that Twitter account with a few interested followers was more important than a Twitter account with many ambivalent followers. However, this theory is wholly unsubstantiated and based on no factual evidence. So, being the curious little analyst that I am, I have decided to test the theory. So let’s have a little qualitative fun here – be sure to recognize the lack of statistical significance and sample size. I currently have my main Twitter account with which I only follow people who I know or specifically interact with, and another account, on which I will actively add as many users as I possibly can, in the hopes of building a very large list of followers, multiple times larger than my main account.

I created the second account a couple of months ago, and already have four times the followers, with less than 1/10th of the @replies and 1/5th the updates. Though I will (and still do) plan on interacting with the @techshots Twitter account, one of its initial purposes was to create a test. Will my 250 “friends” be more apt to click (and retweet) my messages than 1,000 relative strangers only following me in return for an initial follow? I have no doubt that the @jaremy account will have a greater percentage of clicks, but how about a greater overall number? What if I double the other account? Will that number change if I make those tweets during the day or at night? Will they change on different days? And so The Twitter Follower Experiment begins. For the record, I will not use my other account to link to this post (though they could conceivably go through another link to get here).

Here is a list of theories that I plan on testing:
- Will a small list of “friends” drive more traffic than a large list of “followers”?
- Will that smaller list generate a higher percentage of clicks?
- Will it cause greater interaction (retweets)?
- What are the changes when it comes to time of tweet?

My theory: It will generate a higher percentage, but the overall number will eventually scale to the list of more followers. The smaller list will create more retweets and interaction due to the friendly nature of other users and filtering programs like TweetDeck. The results might vary later on in the night as a result that most of my acquaintances are on Twitter earlier on in the day. The same might be true during 9-5 work hours. Though I’m not 100% sure of this.

What do you think will happen? Do you think 250 followers has the power to beat 1,000? This is a small experiment (I should compare 2,500 with 10,000 along with other variations to truly test with any significance), but I’m interested to see the results. Please and I will log my progress over the next couple of weeks and return with my results. Also, if you found this post through a tweet of mine, please mention it below.

Part 2 of the experiment is now complete. Check it out here: Twitter Experiment