A recent study conducted by HP Labs ties in to something I wrote recently; when recruiting followers, quality rules over quantity. This time, it’s applied to Twitter.

HP Labs has performed some research and concluded that the influence a Twitter user has comes down to the quality of their followers versus the quantity of followers they have. While this might seem like common knowledge, it is crucial that followers retweet content to their followers and so on. Without this vital component, followers become nothing more than passive information consumer.

However, the correlation between follower count and popularity may not always be accurate. While someone may have hundreds of thousands of followers, it won’t mean as much when compared to someone who has thousands of followers that constantly retweet content. You may have the eyes of your Twitter followers but do you have their attention? This something Dr. Bernardo Huberman tackled in his video:

“In a world where all information is crowdsourced, how is it that an agenda gets set? There are zillions of messages there, millions of people and somehow, some things end up bubbling all the way to the top and grab the consciousness of a lot of people.”

The full text of the research is available here.

It’s always important to remember that interesting and captivating content will triumph over something that is dull, dreary, or even spam. If you’re not seeing interactivity with your Twitter network, try directly engaging users or creating something worth talking about. If you’re an ad agency, it’s vital to leverage this information because social media is not a numbers game; it’s about captivating and actively engaging your users.

How do YOU actively engage your Twitter followers and how often do they retweet your content?

Via: ReadWriteWeb