Category: Social Media

If you want more Twitter followers, new research provides some easy pointers to the right type of tweeting.

This is the first study to examine what factors are associated with an increased follower-count on Twitter over an extended period of time. Hutto et al. (2013) studied 507 Twitter users over 15 months and half-a-million tweets (PDF).

Some of these are just handy reminders of good Twitter practice, but you may find the odd surprise—see what you think.

1. Avoid negative sentiments

If you’re quite a negative Tweeter, then it could be time to change, if you care about getting more followers. In general people are attracted to those who put out broadly positive tweets.

It seems that negative or sarcastic tweets are not endearing. In this study, being consistently negative was one of the strongest predictors of low follower growth. The average ratio was two positive tweets to one negative, so you’d be looking to beat this to help draw in other users.

2. Inform, don’t meform

This one is so important for gaining new followers. A previous study has shown that there are broadly two types of Twitter users (Naaman, 2010):

• Informers: 20% share information and reply to other users.
• Meformers: 80% mostly send out information about themselves.

This study found that it’s the informers who get more followers, while the meformers lose out.

Being informative was one of the strongest predictors of gaining new followers in this study: this included passing on links and retweeting. In fact being an informer rather than a meformer was associated with 30 times more growth in followers!

3. Boost social proof/trust

Not only should you produce informative tweets, but they should be the kind that are retweet-worthy. Being retweeted is a sign to others that you are worth following. Unfortunately there weren’t any further clues in this research on what makes a tweet retweet-worthy.

However one easy way you can boost social trust is by completing your user profile. Those who gave a web address, a location and a long description were more likely to attract followers in this sample. This has also been found amongst Facebook users, where more complete profiles attract more friends.

4. Stay on topic

Many Twitter users tweet about all kinds of subjects, perhaps thinking that a broader focus will attract more users. Celebrities, in particular, can afford to talk about what they like because it’s them we are interested in. But if you’re not a celebrity, then a scatter-gun approach to tweeting may not be so effective.

In general, people want to find others who share their interests and are like them. This is just as true on Twitter as it is in face-to-face relationships. This study found that people who remained more ‘on-topic’ tended to attract more followers.

Why? Well, it may be a signal-to-noise-type thing. If you stay on-topic, your interests are clearer and it’s easier to make the choice to follow you.

5. Write well and avoid hashtag abuse

Everyone who cares about good writing will be glad to see this one come up. Apparently people really do seek out well-written content, even if it’s only 140 characters or less.

The usual approach online, beyond correct spelling, is to pitch your writing at a reasonably intelligent 12-year-old. But in this study some moderate complexity was associated with increased followers, so don’t be afraid of the odd long word.

While we’re talking about writing well, another Twitter faux pas is the overuse of hashtags. In this sample it was associated with a reduced number of followers. People seem to hate the #random #use #of #hashtags.

6. Be bursty

There’s nothing wrong with having a burst of Twitter activity, say 10 messages in an hour. Twitter users who were bursty from time-to-time tended to attract more followers.

7. Switch from broadcast to direct tweets

Do you direct your tweets to particular people or are they just general broadcasts to the world?

It’s usually a balance between the two and in this study the average split was about 45% broadcast to 55% targeted.

In this sample, though, it paid in terms of more followers to increase the proportion of directed tweets and decrease the broadcasts. Naturally people usually like it when you talk to them directly.

***

• Do remember that this study is correlational so we can’t tell that these factors are causing the increased follower counts, but because the data were collected over 15 months, it is a good indication of what works.

• For more in-depth research on Twitter, check out: Twitter: 10 Psychological Insights. And for companion Facebook info, see Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits.

• And (here comes the inevitable!) you can follow me @PsyBlog.

Image credit: mkhmarketing

From my new book:

“We don’t know her name, but her problem illustrates a new fear. According to a short case report in an academic journal, a 24-year-old woman presented herself to a psychiatric clinic in Athens, Greece. She had joined Facebook eight months previously, and since then, her life had taken a nosedive. She told doctors she had 400 online friends and spend five hours a day on her Facebook page. She recently lost her job as a waitress because she kept sneaking out to visit a nearby Internet cafe. She wasn’t sleeping properly and was feeling anxious. As though to underline the problem, during the clinical interview she took out her mobile phone and tried to check her Facebook page.”

It seems we live in an age of paranoia about what the Internet is doing to our minds. Inspired by this, some psychologists are now creating scales designed to measure whether the Facebook habit is getting out of control.

One of these asks you to answer the following questions on a scale running through very rarely, rarely, sometimes, often, up to very often (Andreassen, 2012). Note that you should decide how often these have happened during the last year:

• Spent a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planned use of Facebook?
• Used Facebook in order to forget about personal problems?
• Felt an urge to use Facebook more and more?
• Become restless or troubled if you have been prohibited from using Facebook?
• Used Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies?
• Tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success?

According to the author, if the answers are either ‘often’ or ‘very often’ to at least four of these six questions, then the Facebook habit may well be getting out of control.

This is described as a ‘Facebook Addiction Scale’, but can you really be addicted to Facebook? It’s debatable and I’ve discussed this before (see: Does Internet Use Lead to Addiction, Loneliness, Depression…and Syphilis?). Technically, probably not because Facebook gathers together all kinds of activities, like gaming and social networking, and these need to be tested individually (Griffiths, 2012).

That said, some aspects of Facebook use (likely the social networking) do certainly come to rule some people’s behaviour, such that it starts to interfere with their everyday lives.

Bad habit or addiction?

Although I’m a little skeptical about the scale, you can use it to check up on whether any of your habits, not just Facebook, are getting out of control. Try replacing ‘Facebook’ in the questions with any other routine. This is a good informal way of working out if a target routine behaviour might be slipping over into the danger zone.

There is certainly a lot of crossover between bad habits and addiction. For comparison, here is what we classically think of as an addiction:

1. They dominate thoughts and behaviour,
2. They change the way we feel,
3. You need more of them to get the same initial effect,
4. You suffer withdrawal when they are reduced or removed,
5. They conflict with our everyday responsibilities, whether at work or socially.
6. After abstinence, the pattern of behaviour reasserts itself.

When you look at this you can see why the confusion about whether some behaviours are addictions has arisen. Suddenly even very benign behaviours like reading, watching TV or, indeed Facebook use, can start to look like addictions.

It’s important to remember that we’re talking about a sliding scale here. It’s only at the top end, when these behaviour are seriously interfering people’s lives that habits become pathological.

Image credit: nate bolt

Twitter is an unsocial network. 59% of people check email from the bathroom. Online daters do lie, but only a little.

These are just a few of the psychological insights revealed in more than 50 internet psychology studies. Read on for more on how people’s behaviour has adapted (or not) to the demands of the online society.

• Twitter: 10 Psychological Insights: psychological research on Twitter reveals who tweets, how much, what they talk about and why.
• Email’s Dark Side: 10 Psychology Studies: like the telephone or the TV, email is a technology so embedded in our lives, we think nothing of it.
• Six Causes of Online Disinhibition: The online disinhibition effect has cost people their jobs, their income and their relationships, yet many are still oblivious to it.
• Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits: Quick 7-point primer on the psychology of Facebook.
• Online Dating: 10 Psychological Insights: Psychological research reveals who uses internet dating and why, which strategies work, and uncovers the truth about lying online.
• Does Internet Use Lead to Addiction, Loneliness, Depression…and Syphilis? Is the internet bad for us? Psychological research on the link between internet use and addiction, loneliness and depression.
• Online Snooping: Is Your Partner Secretly Watching You? In 44% of married couples, at least one partner is secretly checking up on the other’s online activities.
• Twitter: 7 Highly Effective Habits: New research on half-a-million tweets over 15 months reveals the factors which increase follower-count.
• “Is the Internet Good/Bad For You?” and Other Dumb Questions: Are we beginning to ask the right questions about the psychological effects of the Internet?

Image credit: Darren Hester

When communicating over the internet people don’t feel the same pull towards social conformity as elsewhere. Online, people cast aside their inhibitions, worry less about the consequences of their actions and let it all hang out. Sometimes literally.

Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect and its upshot can be seen everywhere.

Continue reading “Does Your Social Networking Profile Say Too Much?”

Here are a few pointers and thoughts on what I’ve been reading this week on other blogs and elsewhere.

Women don’t talk more than men. New research finds no statistical difference between the amount of words uttered by men and women. Previous research by Louann Brizendine had suggested women speak on average 20,000 words per day while men only speak, on average, 7,000. Wrong! (apparently).

There’s loads more on this from the Language Log. ‘Not Exactly Rocket Science‘ has a good write-up.

Continue reading “Men Chatty as Women | Avoid Sloppy Thinking | Facebook Snubbing”