Attempted Bloggery: The Missing 1,800 Twitter Followers

Saturday, January 2, 2016

The Missing 1,800 Twitter Followers

By January 16, 2015, I had reached 1071 Twitter followers and I set myself an admittedly ambitious goal.

My Twitter Stats as of January 16, 2015

This goal was that I would add about ten followers each day and that I then would reach some 5,000 Twitter followers handily by January 1, 2016. This in turn would generate a large increase in traffic to this blog, as I would promote it daily with an unending stream of brilliantly compelling tweets. It seemed like a good enough plan, but things didn't quite work out as foreseen. In fact, I'm about 1,800 Twitter followers shy of my goal. What happened?

One of the easiest ways to add more followers—or so it seemed—is to follow more Twitter accounts yourself and hope they follow you back. Unfortunately, this strategy falls apart once you follow 2,000 accounts as the total number of accounts you can have subsequently is limited to no more than ten percent more than the number of accounts already following you. This forces a sudden change in Twitter strategy to include more aggressive unfollowing of accounts which don't readily reciprocate your interest. The end result for me is that I could get just a little more than halfway to my goal of 5,000 followers by yesterday's deadline.

My Twitter Stats as of January 1, 2016

Even more perplexing, despite my generating almost 6,000 more-or-less earthshaking tweets last year, my blog readership remained unchanged at 15,000 page views each month, give or take.

Attempted Bloggery All-Time Page Views

I hate falling behind. Going forward, I'm going to continue to try to grow my Twitter followers. My new goal is belatedly to reach those 5,000 total Twitter followers by Columbus Day 2016. That should be a piece of cake. What could possibly go wrong?

Note: Regarding social media, I'm active mostly on Twitter and Google+. I'm not really sure what the others are for.
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