Right! There's a diffusion of attention which makes the value of a follower decrease over time.
It's just one example, but I tried to measure this once by graphing clicks on tweets by Tim O'Reilly. He's got a nice history since he was early on Twitter and mostly uses Bit.ly so click data is publicly available.
What I found was that in 2010 he had about 500k followers and was getting 800 clicks per link on average. But by 2018, he was only getting 400 clicks despite his follower count having grown to 2M.
So, from Tim's perspective, the value of a follower dropped by a factor of 8. I think that's interesting even if we don't know exactly why the drop because it highlights the vanity of follower counts. Rather than feeling like his audience grew on Twitter, he should feel like it shrunk in half.
It's hard to draw definitive conclusions on why the drop. Was it diffusion? People who worked at Twitter tell me it was a cultural change too where people stopped using Twitter as a feed reader. So maybe that's part of it too.
I wonder if theres a correlation between the freshness of a follower and their value. I wonder if you're more likely to engage with something shortly after you follow.
I've definitely done it myself. I follow because I'm really interested, so I interact with the posts on the new thing, and gradually I get less interested as the content becomes less novel. Just as an example, I got really interested in the CNCF and followed them, but after a time, my interest in updated from them waned. I went from wanting to see everything they were doing, to only caring about major updates to software, to really only caring when something new joins the CNCF.
Twitter has probably changed the algorithm to decrease unpaid reach. Facebook has done this since earlier. Things don't go viral in the same way as they used to. There are some negative feedback for limiting post reach in Facebook now.
Also, as his followers over time follows more people, their feed will get saturated with tweets.
It's just one example, but I tried to measure this once by graphing clicks on tweets by Tim O'Reilly. He's got a nice history since he was early on Twitter and mostly uses Bit.ly so click data is publicly available.
What I found was that in 2010 he had about 500k followers and was getting 800 clicks per link on average. But by 2018, he was only getting 400 clicks despite his follower count having grown to 2M.
So, from Tim's perspective, the value of a follower dropped by a factor of 8. I think that's interesting even if we don't know exactly why the drop because it highlights the vanity of follower counts. Rather than feeling like his audience grew on Twitter, he should feel like it shrunk in half.
It's hard to draw definitive conclusions on why the drop. Was it diffusion? People who worked at Twitter tell me it was a cultural change too where people stopped using Twitter as a feed reader. So maybe that's part of it too.
Measurement is hard and conclusions even harder.