The Famous Are Different From You And Me

Shea Bennett via AllTwitter

A recent study from Hubspot has determined that while highly-followed Twitter accounts share a lot of links, they converse less frequently than people who follow less than a thousand people.

Twitter accounts with a million or more followers tweet links three times more frequently than users with 1,000 followers or less, but only about 7% of their tweets are replies, compared with 17% for those with the smaller network.

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I am not sure of the conclusion, that conversation doesn’t grow reach. These twitterers, with a million plus followers, are generally followed for something other than their curatorial and social skills: they are famous for their looks, acting, fiction, music, or some other notoriety. People follow them for completely different reasons than, say, following me.

Better to paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald, and say that the famous are different from you and me.

I’d like to see a study about twitterers that are a/ not famous for something else, but b/ have amassed large following (more than 10,000 followers). What works for them might lead to better insights for the average joe who wants more followers.

The other findings are interesting, too: a lot of the social gestures in social media — likes, comments, and so on — don’t lead to more views. So, a person who has a dense network of involved friends might not be growing her network as a function of that network’s activities. This is a problem suitable for social network graph analysis, because all networks are not alike, and popularity isn’t the only way to measure impact (see It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence).