The Most Important People on the Internet
According to Twitter I have 160 followers, and they are the most important people there. They're the only ones listening. But who is the most important, and how can I exploit them for a Twitter high score?
I’ve always enjoyed Twitter. Facebook is fine for staying connected with family and friends, but sometimes that connectedness brings uncomfortable familiarity with Grandpa Billy’s thinly masked racism and Aunt Polly’s “inspirational” quote spam. You can mute everyone, but it’s easier just to not bother. Twitter though… Twitter is low-key. You follow and unfollow on a whim, and the people you follow don’t expect anything of you. Messages are short, and it’s easy to drop in and out of (plus you get a little countdown of characters when tweeting, and I like a countdown).
160 followers sounds mightily impressive to anyone unfamiliar with the platform. The Joe parade is coming! 160 adulating fans in tow, all with banners aloft and chanting his name. Less impressive on closer inspection when it’s revealed that many of these people are actually cardboard cut-outs and the remainder are oblivious to their involvement in this ceremony. Even more unimpressive when we find out the average number of followers on Twitter is over 700, and I’ve been on the site since 2009. Nevertheless, as a show of gratitude to those that have stuck around I’m going to actually look at that list of followers and find out exactly who I should be desperately pandering to.
One click into that list and I can see that even Twitter’s pathetic spambot recognition has identified 5 of those 160 as nefarious robo-dickheads.
Now we no longer have the right number of people for a 200 year space trip. Probably for the best. Upon further inspection of the list it’s clear that another 12 of our synthetic chums have avoided the filter. That leaves us with a dwindling pack of 143 accounts with actual humans behind them. So how do we determine how important someone is?
Now it’s time to strip everyone of their humanity and boil them down to their numbers. If “Followers” are the measure of a Twitter high score, then a follower’s individual value can be measured by their potential to attract more. A follower with 500 followers of their own means 500 potential recipients of your rapier wit, if this follower hits the hallowed Retweet button. The number of users that they follow also comes into play though. If you are one of 100 then it’s likely your sexy selfie will be seen. If it’s one in 10,000 then the link to your tiresome blog post may never be spotted. The inexorable march of the Twitter timeline is unforgiving.
So you can work out your own value just by dividing your number of followers by the number of people you follow. If you follow the same number of people that follow you then your value will be 1. My own value is 0.533 (160/300), which doesn’t seem very good. And even though every “follower” is also a “follows” from the followers perspective, that doesn’t mean our mean (mean) value across Twitter is 1. If you’re in doubt, imagine Twitter with only 5 users (seems great, huh?) then take a look at the below table:
In this example user E is the titan of 5-user Twitter, with 4 followers and only following 1 person, giving a value of 4. So that one user that E follows (user B) may yet reach the heights of 4 whole followers, even though they’re sitting at a lowly 1. Does this show that the titans of 300-million-user-Twitter are also pulling that mean value above 1? If anyone can run those numbers for me then I’d be interested to know.
There’s something still missing here though. What use is a follower with a high value if they’re no longer using Twitter? If they’re not going to see your tweet, then they have no value. They are dead to us. Let’s call them “dead users”. As Twitter doesn’t make users’ login/usage details available to us, we’ll need to just use the date of their last tweet. We’ll pick an arbitrary 100 days, and say that if you haven’t made a noise in that amount of time then you’re effectively gone. So what does that do to my beloved 143?
Sliced atwain. Half of my followers are essentially not following. They dropped dead on the Joe Parade back in 2012, and nobody’s been to check on them since. How could I have been so neglectful?
Nevertheless, we still have 72 followers alive and (presumably) well that I can be thankful for. If you clicked on this link from Twitter, then you are likely one of those 72. If you have read this far regardless of where you arrived from, please accept my sincerest apologies. So without further ado, here’s my Top 5 most valuable followers:
#5: @FauxFawx – 2.57
#4: @Ornsack – 4.20
#3: @michaelmphysics – 5.28
#2: @RocketLGCentral – 6.79
#1: @65dos – 20.49
And that’s that. My favourite band at the top spot making up more than a quarter of my followers’ total value. A Rocket League news account following me despite me being only marginally above average at the game (I’m a Gold III, which is approximately top 46% of players). Two brilliantly minded content creators, one who has featured here before and made some brilliant Jurassic Park content in their youth, the other is the author of Twitter’s funniest tweet and made some brilliant Jurassic Park content in their youth. Fifth is someone who I have (…bear with me a second) only just followed back on Twitter because I didn’t realise how important they were.
I can see that some of you followers have some impressive followers of your own, including Peter Serafinowicz (154.94), Stephen Fry (261.86) and Duncan Bannatyne (1,175.68). I mean, it’s not quite a Shakira (250,001.13) or Elon Musk (399,249.25), but it does eclipse anything in my humble list. In an ideal world these would have factored into your own value, but that’s an infinite rabbit-hole that I don’t want to go down.
If you didn’t make the top 5, you can at least check where your invaluable ass gets you on the full list of alive followers below:
Of course, all of this glosses over the really important details of who is likely to interact with you on the platform. If you ever remember retweeting something of mine, or if somehow you made it to the end of this pointless post, then you’re the real MVP. You’re the one that has actualised their potential. Put yourself at number zero. Zero the hero.