| A lot of people are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule regarding social networks. 90% is just lurking and never tweets, 9% might occasionally tweet, and 1% writes most tweets, or more accurately...writes the tweets that generate the most engagement. What not everybody understands is that this rule pretty much also applies to every individual. If you have a 1000 followers, you should very much assume that 90% never even sees your tweets. 10% might see it, of which possibly 1% bothers to lift their finger and like it. An even smaller percentage might make the gigantic effort of typing a comment. These numbers roughly play out on the author's twitter profile where the typical post has 0-1 likes with the occasional outlier of 3-5 likes, and in general...almost no comments at all. So the roughly 500 followers add up to this tiny amount of actual engagement that you can substantiate to about 5 people. It's a very rough guidance, but dividing followers by a 100 can't be far off in trying to come to a meaningful following. If you think that's pessimistic, consider this extreme example: https://twitter.com/nytimes The NYTimes has a stunning 53M followers. When you scroll through their feed, notice how the typical tweet struggles to even get 100 likes or comments. There's the occasional outlier regarding politically impactful tweets, but even those fail to impress. If we are to take their "typical" tweet and round that up to 100 likes / comments, which is already optimistic, we're talking about an engagement percentage of 0.0002%, or 1 in 5,000 followers engaging. When you do this same exercise for somebody that truly gets Twitter, Elon Musk (for better or worse), we're talking about roughly 1 in 1,000 followers engaging. This doesn't even account for bots. And it also doesn't go into the issue of actual engagement typically being of a very low quality, hardly enriching. In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are not great for community building or rich conversations. Good old forums, reddit, HN, Discord and even Facebook groups are vastly superior at it. |