Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What factors go into determining how many Twitter followers you gain (and lose) each day? I analyzed thousands of accounts to find the answer.

Key takeaways

• The types of content you tweet have significant impacts on attracting and keeping followers.
• Hashtags probably aren't dead.
• Each tweet that includes an image, has a hashtag, is a retweet, or mentions someone associates with 2-6% more daily followers.
• Just as it does with Rand, your account will likely have individualized factors that move the needle for you.
• You can explore these via Excel! Check your Followerwonk account for a complimentary spreadsheet of your Twitter activity.
• Don't forget to follow me @petebray so that I can test whether this blog post significantly moves my follower count! :) And let me know what you uncover.

One of my favorite topics to research is ReTweeting. I have several very large (millions and hundreds of millions of rows) datasets that I use to do my analysis. The results of my research with these databases are best practices, generated across many industries, timezones, account types and languages. This data is a great starting point for your experimentation.

The best data is always your data. 

So I created a free tool, ReTweetLab that allows you to do the same kind of analysis that I conduct on my large datasets on your account (or any other Twitter account you want).