What makes some people more popular on Twitter than others? 
Well it isn’t how often you tweet apparently – although it probably helps if you don’t abandon your account for weeks on end – but how you tweet.
According to new research, which studied 500,000 tweets posted by more than 500 Twitter users over a 15 month period, the most successful tweeters, with the most followers:
* Don’t talk about themselves too much. Followers prefer informational content rather than too much stuff about you.
* Are positive. Negative posts about death, unemployment and poor health are not as popular.
* Avoid hashtags. Too many hashtags is a no and the study concluded Twitter users with a high ‘hashtag ratio’ attracted fewer followers.
* Are not ‘Meformers’ – those who share content about themselves are less popular than those who share content from others.
* Are informers ie: people prefer retweeted news, shared factual information and links.
* Tweets must be clear and legible. The easier your tweets are to understand, the more people will follow you.
Assistant Professor Eric Gilbert who with his team at the Georgia Tech in Atlanta, undertook the research, told the Daily Mail: “Followers are Twitter’s most basic currency, yet little is understood about how to grow such an audience.
“For the first time we were able to explore the relative effects of social behaviour, message content and network structure and show which of these factors has more influence on the number of Twitter followers.”
Read more: What sort of Twitter user are you?
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