Digital Evolution

Category: Experiment

  • Confucius on Twitter – first findings

    Let’s revisit that Confucius experiment with some numbers.

    Confucius has 16 followers. He is following them all back. Without planned promotion this wont go very far and growth will be organic. To gain in popularity, Confucius needs to be promoted. This is very much confirming a early Internet web 1.0 moto: ‘If you build it, they won’t automatically come.’

    In an attempt to promote or make Confucius more findable, I added the tags #quote and #Confucius when they could fit, which probaly helped a bit.

    Interestingly his quotes were re-tweeted 6 times (one quote re-tweeted 4 times). He follows the users re-tweeting. This prompts me to think that we are seeing a little bit of the viral effect here, where the quote are being re-tweeted. Number of re-tweet if a good endorsement metric. It is actual human interaction, as followers sometimes can be simple spam. This is a good indication that the user liked or found value in following Confucius.

    Today, I changed the name to Confucius140, which I find a bit more clever.

    Next steps are to pro-actively promote Confucius on twitter. Stay tuned.

  • Confucius on Twitter

    This is a quick experiment on Twitter. The idea is simple. Create a twitter account where the tweets are relevant to the followers and updated regularly. To start with: no promotion or buzz, no tags, 2 updates per days.  Then play with some of those settings and see how this influence the number of followers / retweet etc…

    Tweeting famous quotes seems like a good of providing the relevant regular content updates. Confucius must be one of the most quoted and less controversial person. So I created the @confucious__says twitter account, wired it to the TweetLater service and populated some tweets.

    With the TweetLater service I also added an auto-follow and ‘auto direct message response’ to new followers, to make this a little more interactive.

    I hope to make interesting observations on the number of follower, how it does increase (or not) and how often the updates are retweeted.

    Similar services are already existing on twitter:

    • @justquoted with over 1700 followers and a quote every hour, tagged with #quote and linking back to the site.
    • @Quotweet 137 followers and irregular updates.
    • @TheBestQuotes over 1200 followers: “We bring you the best, worst, funniest and most inspiring Quotes ever uttered.”
    • @Confucius_Says (996 followers)
    • @tinyConfucius – the most successfull with 1900 followers have a similar concept
    • @KongQiu (140 followers)

    Let’s see where this one goes. Next will be to push the feed to Facebook :)

    As Confucius says: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”