Results tagged “suggestedusers”

A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to collect some useful data since I'd been logging my account's activity using Gina Trapani's ThinkTank application. So I offered an Amazon gift certificate as a little token prize to encourage everybody to chip in ideas of how to analyze that data.

As my follower count crept past 300,000 a number of you responded with suggestions of what information you were curious about, submitting your ideas by using the #sulidea hashtag.

Before I reveal who's won an Amazon certificate, here's a list of all of the suggestions that I found, sorted by Twitter user name.

Since there were lots of good ideas, I've decided to give out two awards, one for the most universal, and one for the most thought-provoking.

Nate Chenenko asked, "How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?" I think this is the fundamental question. Are people who follow someone on the suggested user list interested in posting to Twitter at all? Is it just a passive experience for them? Ricardo Guerrero formulated this in terms of time period of activity instead of tweet count, which is similar but slightly less indicative, when he asked, "I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed." And Jay Neff phrased it as, "What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time" So Ricardo and Jay get Honorable Mentions, along with a few others who asked similar questions, while Nate gets a prize.

And Sharon Henry gets a prize for articulating another common theme in an interesting way: "Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000 ". That seems eminently doable, so I really found it appealing. In short, what I'm hoping for is two core bits of data from which we can extrapolate a lot of meaning:

• How many followers do each of my followers have?
• How many tweets do each of my followers have, and when was the last time they were active?

Those are pretty straightforward requests to make with the Twitter API. So, there's still a chance to win another prize. If you're a coder, commit either of those queries as a feature built onto ThinkTank and I'll send you a 500 GB portable hard drive.

Thanks to everybody who participated! I'll try to make the data from these requests available as soon as possible, and the few questions above that I have answers to will be replied to shortly.