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.