Indent four

I’ve been doing quite some research on social media the last few weeks as we’re preparing a workshop at our company about social media. Apart from reading a lot of blogs and articles I’ve also found some books and just read another amazing account of causality reversal.

The human brain is excessively focussed on causality. If we hear a loud ‘bang’ here at the Zest Office we look outside at the road to see where the cars are that have collided. To clarify causality: Us looking outside the window does not cause car accidents in Hoogvliet the Netherlands. You can still drive safely past our offices. Two cars are having an intense hug, this causes a loud sound, we hear the bang and look outside. Cause and effect.

Now I’m reading a chapter on using Twitter and the author has done some research on thousands of accounts. One of the astonishing results is that “Certain titles in your bio tend to lead to more followers.” Marketers and Entrepreneurs have more followers than students and nerds. The use of emoticons like should also be discouraged if you are keen on attracting more followers.

Could it just possibly be that entrepreneurs and marketeers tend to have a larger network than other people, are more focussed on delivering interesting and regular content and that people who use smilies in their bio’s are less serious about their twitter accounts in the first place. Those attributes (quality of tweets, larger people network) cause the higher number of followers. Another effect of you being a student is that you mention that fact in your Twitter bio.

But to say that you should avoid mentioning that you are a student or use smilies because that tends to give you more followers, the holy grail of attention on Twitter? Not really.