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Users' Fear of Losing Followers Will Turn Twitter into a Sponsored Hellscape, Says Science

Twitter likely to turn away from being a platform for social connectivity and into a platform for broadcasting.

Do you ever get stage fright on Twitter? You know, where, following some fantastic tweet, you've suddenly got a bunch of new followers and nothing to say? According to a new study, you're not alone—cutting back on tweets for fear of losing new followers is a common thing.

That may come as no surprise, but the result lends itself to an interesting conclusion: If users cut back on their tweets to focus just on the "good tweets," over time Twitter may end up a medium where people—especially high volume users, like brands, advertisers, and media—spend more time broadcasting than interacting. So while the researchers didn't quite use these words, I will: Twitter's gonna end up an advertising hellscape.

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The study, published in Marketing Science, started with a pool of 2,493 non-commercial Twitter users with follower counts ranging from 13 to tens of thousands. ("We ensured that our users were non-commercial by checking account names, and checking against lists and classifications on sites such as wefollow.com and twitterholic.com," write the authors.) After tracking their activity for 52 days, the team identified 1,355 active users, ones who'd tweeted or grown their follower count during that period.

Now that they'd identified some guinea pigs, authors Andrew Stephen of the University of Pittsburgh and Olivier Toubia of Columbia decided to inflate their egos. They created 100 fake Twitter accounts, and tried to make them as realistic as possible:

The names of the synthetic users were generated using the name generator available at www.fakenamegenerator.com. Before linking to the treated users, profile pictures were uploaded to the synthetic users’ profiles and each synthetic user followed an average of five other synthetic users as well as some celebrities and media organizations (as is typical for many Twitter users). The synthetic users also posted tweets on a regular basis.

They then used those fake accounts to inflate the follower count of some of their test subjects. After 50 days, they'd inflated the follower count of their test subjects by 100 followers. Suddenly, these folks had larger audiences—for some, it was much larger.

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And that's the crux. For users that had either nearly zerio followers (and thus aren't likely very active) or a huge audience, an addition of 100 followers didn't change their tweeting habits—in the latter case, probably because the growth didn't really register.

But for the average Joes on Twitter, the results were more striking. For users with 13 to 26 followers, the big increase in audience caused them to post more, perhaps spurred on by their success. But for those with 62 to 245, their tweet frequency went down. The authors posit, and I'd agree from my own experience with fear-tweeting, that this was due to users not wanting to lose all those folks that somehow thought they were cool.

While that's pretty interesting on its own, as empirical research of Twitter users' behavior isn't particularly common. Yet it's the conclusion the authors draw from this data that's most fascinating. They key question of the paper is whether or not Twitter users find intrinsic or image-based utility from the site—e.g. whether it gives them direct benefits like answers to questions, or boosts to their ego.

The researchers found that as users gain more followers (they found most active users do) image-related utility becomes more important. Basically, if you're more popular on Twitter, you tweet because you want to stay popular. When you've only got a small circle, you probably use it more for interactions and information. (Overall, the study found that "most non-commercial users on Twitter appear to derive more image-related utility from their posting activities than they do intrinsic utility." Finally, scientific evidence that Twitter users are all vapid egomaniacs.)

That means, that, as the authors write:

Non-commercial user contributions to Twitter are likely to decrease as the platform matures and the network’s structure becomes stable. Twitter is likely to become more of a platform where non-commercial users consume content posted by commercial users, rather than a platform where non-commercial users share content with each other.

In other words, because Twitter users increasingly only tweet when they think it will boost their follower count, regular users' decreasing posts will over time be drowned out by commercial entities that tweet as much as they want or can. Now, this effect can be drowned out by regular influxes of new users, but the authors note that if Twitter's growth slows, it may turn away from being a platform for social connectivity and into a platform for broadcasting, all because regular folks are self-censoring for fear of scaring anyone off with bad tweets.

@derektmead