As of this morning, Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) has 223,631 followers (including me). With that many followers, wouldn’t it be great if you could get Guy to follow you? On the face of it, it seems like it would lend a lot of credibility to your account and if you could get his attention, he might retweet one of your tweets to all of his followers! Now wouldn’t that be awesome!
But it’s not likely to happen. Guy is following 245,897 people (his followees), which basically means he’s not following anyone or he follows a small subset of his followees using lists or some other tool.
I’ve been using Twitter for a little more than a year. I currently follow 110 people and I find it very hard to keep up.
Assuming my followees have the same difficulty, I figure that they’re not paying attention to my tweets if I’m one of a thousand people they’re following. Furthermore, if they have a ton of followers, but about the same number of followees, I figure they’re just playing “I’ll follow you if you follow me,” which seems silly to me though I know a lot of “social media gurus” consider it good practice.
Why do we want Followers?
If you’re in business, then presumably the reason you want followers is so that you can communicate to them for one of two reasons:
- Add value to your services through providing support or useful information.
- Sell more either directly through some kind of special offer or indirectly through building your brand.
In either case, you need your followers to actually be paying attention to your tweets, which I’m assuming they can’t do if they are following a zillion people.
Twitter Follower Value (TFV)
So I’ve come up with this simple formula for the value of a follower:
Follower Value = #Followers / #Followees
I’m not sure that it’s original. It seems unlikely to me that it is, but just in case I’m going to call it the Why-it-does-not-matter-if-Guy-Kawasaki is-following-you formula or the Twitter Follower Value (TFV) formula for short.
Let’s take Guy as an example:
- #Followers: 223,631
- #Followees: 245,897
- TFV: 0.91
That’s not a great TFV.
Take Tim O’Reilly (@timOReilly) as another example. He wrote a book on Twitter, which is mostly geared towards using Twitter for staying in touch with family and friends, but has some business tips in it. Here’s what his TFV looks like:
- #Followers: 1,428,799
- #Followees: 644
- TFV: 2,218.6
Can you see the difference? Is it really almost 2,500 times more valuable to have Tim O’Reilly follow you than it is to have Guy Kawasaki follow you? I think it is, because I think Tim O’Reilly may actually follow his followers, whereas I can’t imagine that Guy Kawasaki does.
Twitter Follower Value (TTFV)
The value of all your followers or your Total Twitter Follower Value (TTFV) would be the sum of your followers’ TFVs. So, if both Guy Kawasaki and Tim O’Reilly are following you and they are your only followers, your TTFV would be:
0.91 + 2,218.6 = 2,219.51
So there it is. Anyone want to build a tool that calculates TTFV? That would be cool!
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It wouldn’t be that hard to create actually…
April 1st, 2010 at 9:32 am
[...] a comment » Nat Dunn, who runs the training company Webucator, posted an interesting idea on his blog. He was thinking about Twitter, and wondering about how the number of followers and friends (he [...]
April 1st, 2010 at 4:08 pm
[...] In my last post, I presented a Groovy class for computing Twitter Follower Value (TFV), based on Nat Dunn’s definition of the term (number of followers / number of friends). That worked just fine. Then I moved on to calculating [...]
April 1st, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Thanks Ken for your Groovy solution! Those interested, check out http://bit.ly/bqarC5.
April 1st, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Hi Nat,
Some interesting ideas here. I have a few thoughts:
Much like in baseball, there’s got to be some minimums in there. Otherwise, you run into Conan O’Brien, who is followed by 750,000+ and follows… one.
The real fun is in trying to figure out what the benefit of being on the positive side of the equation is. Tim O’Reilly follows 644 accounts. Cross-reference with his RTs. Do the RTs come largely from followers, followees or elsewhere? I suspect the code behind this would be taxing on the Twitter API.
April 5th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Hi John,
Maybe so, but if you’re the number 2 person that Conan O’Brien follows, there is a ton of potential value in having him follow you. I’d have to imagine many of his followers would then follow you thinking you might be the one who gives him ideas for his material.
Nat
April 5th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Hi Nat,
I came across your post as was searching for just this kind of statistic. I’ve been working on a side project called friendalytics.net to explore my twitter relationships, i’ve created a tool to query the twitter API and graph some of the results. It also digests your +/- since your last visit.
I’ve added in TFV and TTFV as i think it really does help characterize some of these otherwise dizzying numbers.
Really it’s just scraping the surface, as your followers’ followers could be one of your immediate followers. A unique list of 2nd degree total follower influence would be an intensive search.
Cheers,
mark
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Hi Mark, I just checked out friendalytics.net and it’s very cool. Thanks for including TFV and TTFV in the report!
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:28 pm
We need to enhance this concept.
Tim OReily may have a million followers, but it is also important to take into account the behaviour of his followees.
Let us say JimBob follows Tim. But JimBob also follows 200,000 people. So Tim may retweet my tweet but JimBob likely won’t see it!
But if SueAnn, who also follows Tim, only follows 100 people, Jim’s retweet of my tweet is likely to be read by her!
So rather thatn TFV = F1/F2
where F1 = Number of followers
and F2 = Number of followees
we need a weighted formula to deal with the fact that some followees are less valuable than others.
I propose defining F3 = 1/F1
The closer F3 is to 1 the higher is the value of the followee. If F1 is infinity, F3 = zero
Sigma F3 = Sum of all F3 values for each of my followees
If all followees followed only Tim, their F1s are all 1 and the F3 value would also be 1 and sum of all F3 would simply be equal to Tim’s F1.
And if all followwees followed an infinite number of people, the sum of F3 would be zero and Tim is useless for us.
Thus TFV should be defined as not F1/F2 but F3/F2
May 29th, 2010 at 3:19 am