News from the Twitter Follow Campaign Trail

Quick follow-up on my blog The art of Indiscriminate Twitter Following…

After a week the @jokeindex account on twitter has gained about 650 followers. That's about 50 less than I expected after seven days as when I started I was pulling 'em down at a little more than 100 a day. But rather than gaining speed, my 'follow everyone' campgaign has reached an eddy in the flow of new followers and losing followers.

Basically, I don't care who @jokeindex follows, which means it's a pretty sorry lot of Twitter whores (meaning, people who follow everyone… um, like @jokeindex). As with real life whores, twitter whores often find themselves in trouble with the establishment and get their accounts suspended or shut down entirely, so I lose a follower.

The more whorish accounts I follow, the more followers I will lose every day through attrition.

Of course, I also lose followers because of Twitter following/follower ratios. You can't follow more than 2,000 accounts unless you have about 1,800 people following you (I think that's right, but I haven't looked it up… Twitter follow ratios are fairly Byzantine to me). So when people hit that limit, and want new followers, they'll start unfollowing accounts they don't really care about.

So, like the swirling waters of the Columbia River trying to push into Pacific Ocean, the account is still pushing ahead just as fast, but it's being pushed back on by the rising tide of follower attrition.

At seven days in, with regular postings of links to www.jokeindex.com I have seen zero change in my traffic. But then, I really don't expect anything to change after one week and less than 700 followers. I'm curious about what happens after months and 70,000 followers.

Unfortunately, the time it actually takes to keep an eye on drift check is probably more time than I wil ultimately want to invest. I can use scripts to autofollow and even auto post, which is where this experiment will probably go next -- then, like that culture in the back of the lab that you set aside for a few months, I'll come back and find out if there's a new cure for cancer, or that disease in Resident Evil that turns everyone into zombies.

I'm guessing the latter.