What is the @girlkawasaki effect? How does this work, and how can it work for you?
Let me first off by telling you that @girlkawasaki is a very real person who has a very real blog. They’re a very good friend of mine and are fortunate to have been an influence of the first draft of this (Originally it could have been the @cxi effect, but that’d be lame and the fruits of my labors resulted in the direct effect to apply to @girlkawasaki :))
So, WTF is this?!? – Alright, I’ll tell you!
While studying the way Twitter works, and more importantly how other people on Twitter work, I began to analyze some trends and patterns of likely events. I personally love conversation on all topics, so I would follow people of all backgrounds on twitter. When someone re-tweets someone else on something interesting, I follow them as well, continuously spreading the love of knowledge whether me sharing or simply learning from others experiences.
I noticed that when you add some people, you may get an immediate follow-back, and more often than not an Auto-DM (Direct Message). A lot of people find these Auto-DM’s to be a bit annoying. I simply find them to be rather insincere and only a little annoying. ;) I do like them because Auto-DM’s typically give rise to the fact that you’re using a 3rd party service like SocialToo or others which auto-sends that, and often Auto-follows on your behalf :)
So if you have a boatload of followers like I do (Hey I’m no @guykawasaki) But I do have a fair number of followers, many of which happen to reside in my own industrie(s) You’ll tend to find that by following a lot of people, a lot of people will often follow you back.
So in that first test, @girlkawasaki wanted followers for the same reasons I do (People to learn and share with) so she followed a bunch of the people I (@cxi) happen to have been following and a number of them ~half followed her back. And this trend would carry on for some time, of people following her either directly (a response to being followed) or randomly based upon tweets, comments and interaction.
So the next phase of this, once @girlkawasaki was seen to have a comfortable following of stable tweets, I then tried to follow everyone (minus spammers and locked accounts) that happened to be *Following* her ~650 people were following @girlkawasaki which were then followed.
This is where it gets interesting. You might think “I’ll get a mass of followers instantly!” But that isn’t true and isn’t the case, because people use different services which have large databases with different scrubbing and updating routines. The result turns out to be that after the first hour of following ~650 people, ~130 twitter accounts followed back.
This is after the first hour ofcourse, and after several hours we’ll see how the numbers reflect. I’m not saying you’re guaranteed to get hundreds of followers if you follow everyone who is following @girlkawasaki, however after one full day I’ll update this to include what the final number looks like. The account I used in this test is indeed an actual real twitter account so these are real live and valid numbers to be working with. :)
This is not a test of a Denial of Service, more of an interest of parties out there (like me) who want to follow more people and want more followers so we can continue our conversation in life, in Tweetdom and most importantly with ourselves :)
This is no disrespect to anyone who follows @girlkawasaki and are interesting in what she tweets (both actual tweets and her wonderful blog posts :)) Just think how many followers you get by consequence when you don’t fall into that small criteria of auto-followers :)
Thanks, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions or leave any comments on your success! :)
Control Group: 373 followers in 17hrs, for 56% followback!
When that’s out of 650 that’s pretty amazing!
