The Psychology of Twitter Followers

The Hidden Psychology of Twitter: What Enables Us to Retweet, Like, Share, and Follow

When I choose someone new to follow, when I compose a new tweet, or when I partake in and favorite an update, I infrequently wonder why. My ensuing sessions would presumably feel erratic to a stranger, and my favoritism comes and goes from one strategy to another.

Indeed, the way I use Twitter is far less arbitrary than I allowed.

There's wisdom and psychology behind the way we all tweet. Experimenters have discovered trends in the way that we perform every major action on Twitter—favoriting, streamlining, participating, and following. And there’s indeed an intriguing bit of psychology behind what makes Twitter so seductive in the first place. Ten's a look at the psychology of Twitter and what makes us follow, favorite, share, and keep coming back for more.

Why we love Twitter is so important. Rats, regulators, and psychology

I've hit further than my fair share of Twitter wormholes and twinkles that turn to hours as I find more and more tweets to read and partake in. Does that sound familiar to you, too? I figured there was a cerebral reason behind the draw of Twitter. After digging around, sure enough, I came across a perfect explanation of this miracle, courtesy University of Texas clinical psychologist Dr Marion Underwood.

The type of underpinning schedule that's the most buttressing is what’s called an intermittent schedule. So, you have a rat pushing a switch, and he gets awarded, but not in a predictable way. Numerous times, that beast pushes that switch and nothing comes, but every once in a while, it gets a great treat. So the rat keeps pressing and pressing and pressing, indeed, though there’s no important underpinning coming because every once in a while, it’s just great.

Click to partake.

This hit home for me. Twitter offers these intermittent prices that keep us coming back. Perhaps you'll check Twitter formerly and see an announcement that someone retweeted you. That’s enough to keep you coming back a sprinkle more times, indeed, if nothing new and satisfying has passed. We keep pushing the switch, hoping for commodity great.

The conception makes complete sense for those who wind up checking Twitter multiple times each day (the same goes for dispatch, too).

And just as there's psychology behind why we love Twitter so much, there’s wisdom and data behind the numerous different ways we interact with one another. Then there are three of the most intriguing studies I've come across.

Why do we follow The 15 factors that affect follower growth

What spurs us to follow someone on Twitter? Experimenters at Georgia Tech and Michigan combined to study the factors involved in the following. Their study looked at more than 500 Twitter druggies and a half-million of their tweets and anatomized follower count over a 15-month period—one of the longest timeframes you'll see in a Twitter study.

The exploration platoon worked from a base of follower growth factors that were made up of variables from social wisdom, linguistics, computer-intermediate communication, and network proposition. In other words, if there's any reason why someone would follow someone differently on Twitter, this study reckons for it.

The factors they came up with boil down to three orders: social actions, communication content, and social network structure. Then are the individual factors for each, starting with social actions.

• Tweet volume
• Burstiness: tweets per hour
• Relations: replies, mentions, and pets
• Broadcast communication: the rate of tweets with no citation

Responsibility of the profile How well is the memoir filled out? Is there a URL in the profile? Is there a position listed?

• The individual factors for communication content
• positive or negative sentiment
• instructional content: rate of tweets containing either a URL, RT, MT, HT, or "via"
• Meformer content: rate of tweets containing tone-representing pronouns like "I," "me," "we," and "us."
• Content focus
• Retweets: how frequently your content gets retweeted
• Hashtag operation
• TReDIX: Tweet Reading Difficulty Index(founded on the frequency of real English words longer than 6 letters)
• The individual factors in social network structure
• Attention-status rate: total followers compared to total following
• Network imbrication: How analogous are the people you follow to those a follower follows?
• Knowing what’s behind each of these factors, how would you rate them in terms of significance? Which factor helps you gain the most followers?

The winner is network imbrication.

In the map above, you'll see that the effect on follower growth spills to both sides of the x-axis. So not only can you see that network imbrication, retweet able content, and a good memoir have positive effects on gaining followers, but you might also notice that broadcast communication (e.g., tweets with no citation), negativity, and hashtags drive follower growth down.

Takeaway The Syslog has a nice recap of the findings from this study, recapitulating points of emphasis from the exploration data. However, try these tips.

• If you want to grow your followers,
• Avoid negative sentiments.
• Inform, don't meform.
• Boost social evidence
• Stay content.
• Write well and avoid hashtag abuse.
• Switch from broadcast to direct tweets.

Why do we partake? A companion to penning the most shareable tweet

I'm sure we'd each love to know what makes for a perfect tweet. Cornell experimenters were interested, too. They conducted a study that examined more than 1.7 million tweet dyads, comparing the differences in language between the two tweets and assigning a value based on which style of tweet earned more retweets. Their conclusion Helpful wording heuristics include adding further information, making one’s language aligned with both community morals and with one’s previous dispatches, and mimicking news captions.

Click to partake.

Still, the experimenters didn't find one. If you were looking for an exact formula for a perfect tweet, They did, still, offer a large number of stylish practices to go on with their conclusion above.

• It helps to ask people to partake.
• Informativeness helps
• It sounds like your community
• Imitate captions
• relate to other people but not to your followership( "he" and "she" rather than "you")
• The easier it is to read, the better.

Maybe most stylish of all, the exploration platoon put together a tool grounded in their findings that can help you perfect your posts. Enter two analogous tweets into the Retweeted More tool, and you'll get an algorithmic answer about which is better.

Ready for some practice? (See how you fare against the algorithm by taking this 25-question test—see if you can pick the tweets that got more participation.)

Takeaway Take alleviation from captions and from your once successful tweets( your buffer analytics can help with this) to write a tweet that's optimized for sharing. Try out the Retweeted More tool to test different performances.

Still, check out the recap from our Twitter webinar (if you're curious what we've set up workshop best for retweets).

Why our favorite response and function

A study published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence sought to put our myriad favoriting styles into order. They quizzed a group of more than 600 Twitter druggies by asking two questions.

• Explain why you tend to favorite tweets.
• Explain the reasons for your most recent favorite tweet.

They entered more than 331 answers to these questions and placed each answer into one or more orders. Then there’s the full taxonomy of orders they used to classify pets.

What's intriguing about the way these 331 answers fell is that there were two distinct use cases for pets. The exploration set up that people favorite a tweet for one of two reasons

•  response/ response
•  Function/ purpose

The psychology then's relatively intriguing. responses, and responses do so directly due to the content of the tweet or the author of the tweet. We like what we like. We love our musketeers and family( and, if I'm being honest, celebrities). When we choose mileage, we're seeking to fulfill a thing or a purpose. We like to bookmark. We like to communicate.

Still, your favorite would fall into the function/purpose order (if you've ever favorited a commodity you agree with). According to the study’s authors, favoriting as agreeing is intended for the author; liking is for the person doing the favoriting.

Takeaway Classifying pets is nothing new; we all feel like we have a system of favoriting tweets. The exploration shows, at least, that our system isn't inescapably unique to us. For every stoner who pets their musketeers, there’s a stoner who’s favoriting bookmarks.

Do these perceptions ring true for you?

Psychology shows us how Twitter can be so addictive. We crave a great experience each time we pull the Twitter switch, and it keeps us coming back for more.

Research and data reveal a bit about the way that we use Twitter. We follow grounded on our network, we retweet grounded on tried-and-true formulas, and we favorite for response or function. I'd love to hear your studies in the commentary or on Twitter.