What kinds of tweets appear in your Twitter newsfeed? I run some numbers.
This post is based on how the Twitter algorithms worked on 17 Feb 2022. Of course, those algorithms are bound to change as soon as someone from Twitter reads this post. 🙂 Written from the perspective of a GameLit novelist, this post may, at least in part, be applicable to anyone using Twitter as a platform.
I’m trying to be more active on Twitter, to up my social media presence. Having a greater social media presence on Twitter doesn’t accomplish for me the same that it might for others, but I enjoy the engagement that can occur. I don’t care much for one-sided conversations, and therein lies my issue with Twitter.
Following Back
Over 8.5K Twitter accounts have followed me. I followed over 7.5K of them back. I follow back most accounts that follow me, although I typically vet them first. I look at their profile, naturally, but the real vetting comes from perusing their tweets and replies. Loads of antagonistic, divisive tweets will prevent me from following back. If all their tweets are retweets, there’s no reason to follow back. There’s no reason to follow back if all the tweets are in a language other than English, since I can only read English, and I’m too lazy to use the Google translator on a bunch of tweets. And if the account has no tweets at all, well, I can’t judge something that’s not there.
If an account’s tweets are mostly (or entirely) ads, I’ll read one or two of them, and then there’s no more reason to follow them, because their next tweet will just be more of the same. Many accounts like this are promoting a single product, and all their tweets are nearly identical. I’m typically not remotely interested in the product being sold. But the account accomplished its primary goal, which wasn’t to gain a follower. Its primary goal was to put an ad in front of another person’s eyes, and that goal was accomplished without the need to pay Twitter a fee to promote the tweet. Are they interested in my tweets? Probably not. Of course, there’s a chance, so if they want to remain a follower, why not let them?
What’s That in My Newsfeed?
One might think that my following 7.5K accounts would be sufficient to provide my newsfeed a steady stream of tweets. And I’m never lacking for new tweets in my newsfeed. But most of them aren’t from those 7.5K accounts I follow. Below are some numbers to illustrate my point. I scrolled through 205 tweets in my newsfeed and broke them out by category as to the reason why the Twitter algorithms were showing them to me. I show raw numbers of tweets, followed by the percentage it represents of the total (rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent). Because of round-off error, the total of the percentages below is 100.1%, just so you know.
- Original Tweets made by someone I follow: 35 = 17.1%
- Replies made by someone I follow: 12 = 5.9%
- Retweets made by someone I follow: 26 = 12.7%
- Tweets on the topic of Writing: 9 = 4.4%
- Tweets Liked by someone I follow: 51 = 24.9%
- Tweets by someone followed by someone I follow: 21 = 10.2%
- Tweets based on my likes: 14 = 6.8%
- Replies to tweets made by someone I follow: 2 = 1.0%
- Tweets from Info: 2 = 1.0%
- Tweets on the topic of Books: 1 = 0.5%
- Paid Promotions: 32 = 15.6%
What I Told Twitter I Was Interested In
I follow the topics of Writing and Classic Rock, so anything that comes into my newsfeed based on either of those topics is as welcome as a tweet showing up from someone I directly follow. The first four lines above amounts to 82 tweets that came into my newsfeed based directly on my follows and desired topics. 82 of 205 is 40%. Less than half of what I’m being shown are from sources I indicated I wanted to hear from. Nearly a third of the 82 are retweets of content originally posted by someone I don’t follow, but I’m okay with retweets from people I do follow. A retweet is the result of someone making a conscious decision to further disseminate information or share a good chuckle.
Note that I didn’t receive a single tweet from the Classic Rock topic. To my best recollection, very few tweets from that topic ever show up in my newsfeed. If I want to see them, I have to go to the #Explore tab and scroll past all the announcements of what’s trending in other topics I didn’t choose to follow.
What I Never Told Twitter I Was Interested In
Nearly a quarter of the tweets in my newsfeed are there because someone I followed Liked them. I can see some logic there on the part of the Twitter algorithms: If I follow you and enjoy reading your tweets, then why shouldn’t I enjoy reading the tweets you’ve enjoyed reading? That’s reasonably sound logic. But must they be a quarter of my newsfeed? Why should those tweets, some of them hours if not days old, crowd out tweets from accounts I actually follow?
When I first looked at Twitter this morning (Feb 17, 2022), of the first 50 tweets I scanned in my newsfeed, only one of them was from someone I follow. Of the 7.5K accounts I follow, only one posted anything while I was asleep, apparently. Really? I’m a night owl. People on the US east coast, in my time zone, were getting up to start their day shortly after I went to bed. They had all morning to post something. Many people on the west coast were up before I was. And definitely people in Europe were up. I follow some people who live over there. In fact, the one tweet I saw in my newsfeed this morning from someone I follow was posted from Europe, made 28 minutes before I started looking at Twitter. That one tweet was buried beneath a wall of 49 other tweets, many posted before I last looked at Twitter before going to bed. Why wasn’t that 50th tweet shown to me before 49 tweets from people I’m not following?
And those 34 other tweets from people I follow? Yep, I had to look further to see those. I’d have liked those 35 tweets to have come first in my newsfeed.
Pay Attention to Me
Paid promotions were not quite one-sixth of my newsfeed. Okay. They were mostly all the same tweet, about nothing that interested me. But Twitter needs to make money somehow, and I’ll scroll past one in six tweets if that means I don’t have to pay to use the service. I doubt I’d keep it if Twitter asked me to start paying for it, even if they promised to keep it commercial free. My income has taken a nosedive, so, priorities.
Maybe You Should Be Following Them Too
Tweets posted by someone followed by someone I follow made up a full tenth of my newsfeed. I guess the idea here is to help me discover people to follow. As though 7.5K accounts aren’t enough to follow. Right. I imagine at least one of the 7.5K accounts I follow posted a tweet in the last hour that never showed up in my newsfeed, or at least nowhere near the top.
One tweet appeared in my newsfeed because it belonged to the Books topic. Not that I follow that topic. Why couldn’t that tweet have come from the Classic Rock topic that I do follow? I guess because I follow the Writing topic, I should also be interested in the Books topic. Um, no. Books as a topic is too broad. Give me a GameLit Books topic, and I’ll sign right up.
Popularity Breeds Popularity
Occasionally I see tweets made by people who say they feel invisible on Twitter. No one engages with their tweets, not even to give them a Like, and they wonder why not? It’s because they aren’t already popular, apparently. If you have a ton of Likes, then your tweet gets shown to people who don’t even follow you. I didn’t see one tweet in my newsfeed that said I was being shown it because no one else had Liked it.
I was, however, shown 14 tweets (6.8%) from accounts I don’t follow that were supposedly based on being similar to other tweets I had Liked in the past. But many of those tweets also had dozens if not hundreds of Likes already before showing up in my newsfeed.
Sometimes I see tweets from accounts I follow that haven’t received any Likes. But out of the 205 tweets I assessed above, every one of them had received at least one Like already.
For Your Information
Two of the 205 tweets were from Info. They weren’t informational. One was from Prime Video and the other was from HBO. Both were bait to get me to think about their businesses. Did those companies pay to have tweets added to the Info topic? Is Info even a topic? I can’t find it listed under those available.
In trying to track down the Info topic, I stumbled upon my “Twitter data.” If you’re logged into Twitter, you can check your list of Twitter interests. I have over 500 items on my list, some of which I had a passing interest in once. I’ve been informed I can uncheck the ones that no longer apply to me.
Tell Me You Like Me
It’s easy for me to grow jealous when perusing my newsfeed and profile. So many tweets I see have hundreds of Likes. Not mine. Some of my tweets have Likes but a significant number have zero. Of the ones with Likes, the most Likes on any of my tweets that aren’t retweets or replies is 7. Looking at my replies, the highest number of Likes I found was 13. For my quoted retweets, I found one with 15 Likes. Most of my tweets do well to garner 2 Likes. Many of those with zero Likes are replies I made to someone else’s tweet.
I think it’s only polite to Like a reply someone makes to your tweet, unless you absolutely abhor their reply.
Why Don’t People Like Replies?
Some people don’t Like replies made to their tweets because Twitter hasn’t notified them of the reply. That’s right, the reply isn’t in their notifications or mentions. The original poster needs to make a special effort to go back to look at their previous tweets and look for those that might have new replies, click on one to actually see its replies, and then search for any new ones. If a tweet has hundreds of replies, the poster may need to scroll through them all to find the new ones from people they don’t follow. Busy people don’t have time for this.
The next time you’re considering replying to a tweet posted by someone who doesn’t follow you, keep in mind that they might never become aware of your reply. If they don’t Like your reply, they aren’t necessarily being snobbish, especially if you made your reply hours or days after the initial tweet. The original poster would need to revisit the tweet and look at its replies after you made your reply to it.
To combat this situation for myself and anyone I don’t follow who kindly replies to me, I occasionally scan my tweets and replies, looking to see if anything I posted might have new replies. Today, I found a couple replies made over a week ago but that I’d missed before, and I’m glad to have seen them both. One of them was from a female vocalist whose music I adore, and I was stoked to see she’d given little ole me some of her time. To think I might have missed it….
Twitter’s Holy Grail
For Twitter to work properly for two people, they need to follow each other. Otherwise, the conversation will feel one-sided to one participant and non-existent to the other. There are experts out there who preach that to attain the Holy Grail on Twitter, you need to have a high follower-to-following ratio, that is, you need far more accounts following you than accounts you follow. But guess what? That’s for people who have little intention of engaging with their followers. It’s for people whose followers are already fans and will hang off their every word no matter what they say. Fans like that don’t expect replies, because they know the person is busy doing whatever it is they do that they’re already famous for.
Hurry Up and Follow Me Back So I Can Unfollow You
Some people in search of the Holy Grail try to game Twitter to attain it. They follow you. You politely follow them back. They unfollow you. They do this to enough people, and they attain a fake Holy Grail. If they’re writers, they can present their knockoff of the Holy Grail when they pitch their stories to agents or publishers. Maybe it works out for them initially.
Block Their Asses
To me, that scheme is despicable. If someone follows me for a followback and then unfollows me, I unfollow them and then block them so they can’t pull that shit on me again. If someone wants the Holy Grail, they need to perform certain quests, or what they have isn’t real. So many people in the world look for the easy path to obtaining what they want in life. That’s the attitude that spawns scammers. Judging by the attempts to scam me I receive in my email inbox and on my answering machine every day, there are plenty of people out there willing to scam others to get ahead. The scheme of following for a followback and then unfollowing is exercised by people with the same mentality as a scammer. So I don’t feel bad at all about blocking them.
Don’t Answer the Question
I see a lot of people who’ve attained the Holy Grail by posting open-ended questions. People who see a question might answer, but guess what? It may be just as good for the questioner if their question is Liked rather than replied to. Often these open-ended questions do get more Likes than replies. According to what I saw in my 205-tweet sample data set, tweets are propagated more by Twitter algorithms based on number of Likes than based on number of replies.
Other types of tweets are posted only as Twitter bait. Witticisms are a big one. I tried making a Twitter bait tweet once. It got one Like. Hell, I knew the bait was sour when I posted it. It was entirely too sarcastic to work well as bait. I couldn’t help myself.
Who You Gonna Follow?
If you have a Twitter account, think about how you decide whether to follow someone on Twitter. Do you follow someone because you’re a huge fan? Do you follow them because you love their open-ended questions or other Twitter bait and don’t want to miss any? Or do you follow in the hopes for actual engagement? In the latter case, before you follow someone, look at their follower-to-following ratio. If they have significantly more followers than following, don’t expect them to engage you unless they follow you in turn. Because chances are they’ll never even see any replies you make to their tweets.
You’re So Cool, Can I Tell You Something?
If you really want a specific person to see your tweet, of course you can tag them in the tweet. This might get them to engage you, or it might get them to mute or block you. And don’t even think about sending them a direct message (DM) uninvited. Some people dislike DMs so much, they’ll block you immediately if you send them one. Those who don’t block you might simply ignore any DMs they do receive. In my experience, people who send DMs are trying to sell you something or scam you, unless they’re friend, family, coworker, or the like.
Twitter Gold
If you’re on Twitter to follow the already famous people as a fan and don’t care whether the people you follow ever engage you, then the above discussion maybe doesn’t mean much to you. But you’re gold. You’re the person needed by others in search of the real Holy Grail.
I was in a Twitter conversation with another GameLit author the other day. He’d posted how he could drive up his number of followers by posting more political tweets. I replied to the effect that as long as the followers he had were hardcore fans, then the number of followers he had was impressive. He agreed, but suspected that a decent percentage of his followers were other authors who hadn’t read his books.
Need a Lift?
His point is well taken. I often see tweets with the hashtag #writerslift. These tweets ask for other writers to follow for a followback. I’ve responded to a few of these, but, yeah, those people aren’t likely my fans. Maybe they’ll be engaging, and that would be the value for me in us following each other. It’s cool to discuss the writing process with other writers.
But if the goal is to find the Holy Grail, the only way a #writerslift helps is if one person reneges on the deal. I’ve seen that happen. I’ve followed people who posted #writerslift tweets, to have them not follow back as promised. One such person posted a #writerslift tweet three times on three different days. I followed on the first one. They didn’t follow back. I reminded them on the second and third ones that I had followed them. They still didn’t follow back. Looking at their profile, I saw they had a high follower-to-following ratio. They weren’t following back tons of others who had responded to their #writerslift tweets. I unfollowed and blocked them. They weren’t interested in seeing any of my tweets anyway.
Where the Fans Are
If you’re someone using Twitter as a platform from which to reach fans, it’s necessary for potential fans to have Twitter accounts. I don’t know how many GameLit readers are on Twitter. There are a hundred GameLit-related accounts on Twitter that I’ve added to my GameLit list. Looking through the list just now, I can’t find anyone on it with more than 10K followers. Nearly all of them have fewer than 2K followers, and a good many don’t even have 100 followers. If some of them are following each other as fellow GameLit authors, that doesn’t speak well to there being a lot of hardcore GameLit fans on Twitter other than the authors. I hope I’m wrong.
Moreover, not all of those 100 GameLit-related accounts appear to be active. And I don’t see a ton of replies to tweets on my GameLit list. Tons more activity from GameLit/LitRPG fans occurs in Facebook groups.
The point is, you could have a sky-high follower-to-following ratio, but if your followers aren’t fans or at least potential fans, your ratio doesn’t mean shit when it comes to promoting your work. For instance, I don’t mind following an author of historical romances and having them follow me, but we’re not following each other because we like what the other is selling. At best, we’re following each other to engage in conversations about writing in general, and for me, engagement with others to help me grow and learn is the main reason at the moment to be on Twitter. I’ll still post the occasional promotional tweet, because why not? I know not to expect much of a response to them, because the potential fans aren’t likely seeing them. But there’s always a chance of converting someone who wasn’t a GameLit fan already, right?
Such Sweet Sorrow, but Put a Fork in Me
If I thought about it longer, I’d have more to say about using Twitter. But this post is long enough. My next novel is begging me to return to drafting it. I’d like to release it in March 2022, or at least by the end of April 2022, and there’s still a lot to be done. I also want to release some more puzzle books soon. I have my work cut out for me.
Check out my GameLit list on Twitter. If you’re a GameLit fan, whether author, narrator, reviewer, podcaster, or reader, and you have a Twitter account, feel free to contact me (@eposic) to be added to the list if you’re not already on it. I’d like for it to include everyone on Twitter who cares about GameLit/LitRPG. Twenty people are following the list currently, about a fifth as many as are on it, so being on the list can help your tweets get better noticed by people who care about the genre.
If you’re a creative sort, whether an author, artist, musician, or if you like discussing creativity, follow me on Twitter and I’ll more than likely follow you back. Just note, if you then unfollow me, I’ll eventually find out and return the favor. I use unfollowerstats.com to find the people who have unfollowed me. If you’re searching for the Holy Grail, don’t think for an instant to abuse my good nature in helping you make a fake one.
If you’ve been taken advantage of by these fakers, you can help them understand the folly of their ways by unfollowing and blocking them. If enough people respond to these fakers this way, maybe the practice will stop.
And, hey, if you’re searching for the Twitter Holy Grail, consider doing the work to get a real one.
Cheers! Thanks for reading.