We've all been twittering for some time now. My first tweet was in February of 2008, thank you, thank you very much. (Of course my first tweet, like so many new users, was "werkin" and then I didn't tweet for another 10 months.)
But anyway, Twitter's not new anymore. And you've probably started to notice some things about how it works. That, for example, you're probably not reading everything from the people you follow, or even interacting with them at all. Like wearing a t-shirt or slapping on a bumper sticker or joining a Facebook fan page, we use Twitter to identify ourselves by brands that we like or celebrities they look up to. (I'm following @baconsalt, for example.) We also use Twitter to make weak connections with associates. The result is that we also use Twitter in many ways that are *not* interactive at all. I bet you only pay attention to a small sliver of your Twitter stream.
Heard of the "million follower fallacy"?
A group of researchers have proven something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways. -ReadWriteWeb
Don't tell Ashton.
But there is a new metric for evaluating your level of influence on Twitter. Besides retweets, mentions and the unofficial #Follow Fridays, Twitter now has lists. Since users create lists of users in order to make them easier to read -- as in a "news" list for the morning, "friends" list for the weekends and "funny" list for when you need a chuckle -- you can gauge the usefulness of a Twitter feed by the number of lists that user has got herself onto.
I'm on 9 lists, for example, ranging from "Portland tweeters" to "PR tweeps." But @shitmydadsays is on no less than 30,100 lists.
So how can social people like ourselves make use of this new tool? How do we GET LISTED ON TWITTER?
1. Get registered. Putting yourself into directories like Twellow and WeFollow.com under the appropriate keywords will help get you discovered by users who will be interested in your stream and add you to their Twitter lists.
2. Be a celebrity. Obvious. We'll skip telling you how to become a celebrity -- but if you can harness your own personal celebrity or the celebrity of your hometown or brand, you're in! Tweet your hardest and watch your Twitter list count go up.
3. Tweet often about a unique topic or topics. Although the research shows that many influential users could tweet about a variety of topics -- @zappos, for example, whose tweets are very random -- and still get retweeted, this is the easy way to establish yourself and find a place on other users' Twitter lists. Users that limit their tweets to a single topic gain the most influence, fastest.
4. Be an active list-maker. Make your own Twitter lists for related topics and include yourself and other uses you'd like to connect with. This is another way to get users to associate you with certain topics.
5. Stay involved. The researchers who discovered the million follower fallacy found that "influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort." In order to gain and maintain influence over followers and fellow Twitterers, users need to keep great personal involvement. Remember these catchphrases still apply: "content is king" but also "query deserves freshness." You not only need good content, you need to constantly be making new content if you want to be influential and get listed on Twitter.
6. Show your appreciation. Tweet a link to each list you get added to. The list-maker will appreciate it and it turns your followers on to new lists as well.
***UPDATE, 3/26: More good stats and analysis from ReadWriteWeb on how influencers tweet.
-Adrianne (@msfener)
