HOW @riscario BECAME #12,178 OUT OF 100,000,000 ON TWITTER

What we want to be true doesn't become true because we want it (to be true).

Twittercounter says that @riscario (twitter.com/riscario) has 18,000 followers. That's the Twitter channel that accompanies this blog. Sceptical? Take a look at this screen shot.

Now do you believe? Me neither. The normal audience is several hundred.

An audience of 18,032 followers would make @riscario #12,178 on Twitter according to the screen shot from twittercounter.com. Click on it for a larger version.

There are techniques to get thousands of followers on Twitter. They seem to involve you following thousands of people and them reciprocating. You can get quantity quickly, but quality takes time. The growth of @riscario is organic, and slow. That's fine.

The Real Rank

The correct rank for @riscario is #160,191 based on 290 followers. That may underwhelm you, but there are over 100 million Twitter users. That impressive total is misleading because many accounts are dormant.

If you define a true Twitter user as

• 10+ followers, and
• 10+ friends, and
• 10+ tweets

then only 29% qualify. That's still 2.9 million users and up from 21% in January 2010.
This three-month graph shows the statistics returning to normal.

Notice how the trend looks consistent and predictive … until the drop two days ago.

@what

The Twitter channel @riscario (twitter.com/riscario) supplements this blog and the podcast. You'll find an update on most days. If you're more interested in marketing, there's @mActuary (twitter.com/mActuary), which supplements my Marketing Actuary blog for entrepreneurs. Again, the goal is one meaningful tweet per day.

Some Twitter users have thousands and thousands of tweets, adding many daily. Ranking high on that list would scare me. Time is too precious to fritter.

Links

• 13 questions to evaluate an investment that's "too good to be true"
• More people, and inevitably scammers, are using Twitter (TechCrunch, Jul 2010)

Podcast Episode 77 (3:31)

direct download | Internet Archive page

PS If you use Twitter regularly, you can easily rank high too.