Data: Tweet lots of links to get followers

As I’ve said before, “if you’ve seen me speaking, or read my stuff, you may know that one of my favourite past times is busting social media marketing myths, and one of my favourite examples of ‘unicorns and rainbows’ advice is ‘engage in the conversation'”.

My effort to analytically study the unicorns-and-rainbows myth of “engaging in the conversation” started by looking at the relationship between the number of followers a user has and the percentage of their Tweets that are “@” replies. I found that highly followed users are less conversational than those with few followers.

This time, I looked at the relationship between follower count and the percentage of a user’s tweets that contain links and are not replies. Using a sample of random, recently active Twitter accounts, I found a strong correlation. As the amount of links a user tweets increases the number of followers they have also increases. And users with more than 1 000 followers tend to tweet many more links than users with fewer than 1 000 followers.

The data is starting to mount to suggest that “engaging in the conversation” is a waste of time from a marketing and reach-building perspective, especially when compared to sharing content.