What Are Considered The Criteria of A Successful Twitter Account?

8 May 2009

Today I came across an article written by Themos Kalafatis at Life Analytics, which really caught my attention. In his article, Themos revealed how Predictive Analytics (some fancy statistics kungfu) can help with ‘predicting’ which type of Twitter account is considered of having the ‘pulling power‘ for people to follow, and keep following.

The result of this statistics-heavy calculation was very fascinating, and basically reinforced what I’ve been always advising people to do with their Twitter Account when they first join, as well as confirming my reasons why I won’t follow back some accounts.

Have a look at the following diagram, which was taken from Themos’ article:

If you read the diagram carefully, what it basically says is, to have a successful Twitter Account you need to do the following:

You have got to have a bio!
Post at least 3 links per 20 tweets a day
Or Post at least 5 tweets a day
Post often (as in daily)

These points above are fine if we only measure the account base on Quantity. Some of us though, including me, are looking for Quality. For example, an active Spammer can post many tweets a day, with links in them, but do we consider this account as successful? Actually, that could be a subjective matter, because from the spammer’s point of view, the account could be considered successful if he/she could get a good conversion rate from those tweets.
Nevertheless, for most of us, this is probably not what we are looking for from Twitter. We are looking for Quality Tweets, with genuine value-added links (not some one-liner sales link).
Another conclusion that came out from this is that ‘sending tweets to other users‘, i.e. tweets with @username, is not consider to contribute much to the account’s success. Well, I beg to differ, for me Conversation/Engagement is very important in deciding if I’m going to follow the person or not.
Consider these two stats from two different users (taken from MrTweet), which one that you more likely to follow?

At this point, I might as well add one more criteria that I think it’s important for me, which is the ratio of followings/followers that a user has. People with large ratio of following, against very small number of followers (or even none), is most likely not worth to follow. Of course there are some exceptions, such as Media Companies which create the account just for broadcast only, or companies that use the account for update only (e.g. @twitter_status), or one of those so-called Real-Life Celebrities (you know who).

Themos did say, at the end of his post, though that the calculation is not complete and there is still more to offer in the future posts (the article is the first part of the series):

The analysis shown above gives many insights but it does not take into account what the users say and how this affects the popularity of a Twitter account. Text Mining will try to give some answers for this question and also identify which keywords on Twitter profiles seem to be associated with many followers.

It would be interesting to see what Themos will deduct from his next analysis. I am definitely watching the space.