How your Tweets and Twitter followers are correlated? [Case Study]

It has been a week since I became active on Twitter and I have devoted this time in learning the etiquette of this social media site. This also allowed me some time to observe some correlation between the tweets and followers you get subsequent to those tweets.

First let me give you some stats of my Twitter usage during the week. At the time of writing this post , I had made 170 updates (tweets) ,I have 57 people following me and I am following 32 people. I got 12 @ replies and sent 17 . I got 4 DMs (direct messages) and sent out 4 to others.These numbers are not great but since I have been there only for a week and mostly as bystander, so, these numbers are all expected.

During these one week I noticed some specific type of tweets getting me more followers than others. Furthermore, this has been a repetitive phenomenon ,meaning this phenomenon has been reproducible time and again. This led me to think that there certainly is some correlation between tweets and follower number.

With that said, I would now move on to the things I have observed.
The first surge in the followers number came in when I tweeted a famous humorous quote by Albert Einstein.Here is the screenshot of the tweet I am talking about.

I got 10 followers within an hour of posting the quote. I wondered ,if that was due to the quote I just posted. I was not sure of it. So, I posted another humorous quote to check if it was the earlier quote that caused the surge.Here is the screenshot of that another tweet.

This one got me 8 followers about half an hour after it was posted.

So,I was wondering what caused these two tweets to get some followers? Well, I am not sure. But my obvious guess is , these tweets were humorous in nature and humorous things are quite popular in social media. I guess, the followers picked this up from public timeline and followed me because they found those tweets entertaining.

Now take a look at the screenshots of these two tweets that were posted hours after the earlier ones.

These two tweets were made at an interval of an hour between them.The “blogging news” tweet was earlier to go.With this one I got 7 followers within half an hour. Another thing that I noted with this one was most of the followers were bloggers and most said they were passionate about blogging in their profiles.

Now I think you are correlating it well. By using the word “blogging news” , I got followers who were bloggers. My explanation for this one is- these followers made twitter search using the term “blogging” or “blogging news” and saw my tweet there, got interested and followed me afterwards( I am not sure of my explanation though).

Now take the case of “twitter news” tweet (screenshot above). This one caused the steepest spike in followers count. It got me 17 followers just after it was posted.(May be because it involved three celebrities- “Obama” ,”Britney Spears” and “Twitter”. Furthermore, it was about a news that was red hot when it was posted.

I posted another newsy material to test this hypothesis further. This time I tweeted this news-

Although in terms of numbers it didn’t bring me more followers ( I got 4 subscribers after this one) but I noted an interesting thing here. This time 3 out of those 4 followers were interested in Search engines and SEO (the news I tweeted was about google). I think you are getting the correlation right.

Conclusion-
The number of Tweeter followers increases when you tweet about something that is popular in social media. In my case it was humour and breaking news. Furthermore , you get targeted followers if you just tweet about the topic you are interested in. In my case I got bloggers as followers when I tweeted about blogging news and Search engine marketers when I tweeted about Google.

P.S.- These datas are based on my usage for past one week only. This certainly is not reliable and it has to be supported by further datas. I will keep you updated on how it goes. In the meantime, I would like to get some feedback from you about your experiences with twitter and some correlation between your tweets and followers if you have seen it happen.