So you wondered the same question about your graphic design blog too? Join the crowd! But I do have some interesting and hopeful numbers for you.
First, some background context
I’ve run the BonFX blog since September 2009. Way, way, way back then, I didn’t get Twitter. I was just getting a handle on blogging. I had a Twitter account, because, well, I was supposed to. I didn’t know what to do with it though. Should I post what cool pizza place I found? Nah. In those early days, I was interested in SEO best practices in HTML and wondered primarily if I should have images or not in my posts. How quaint!
It takes time, quite a bit of time, to learn what blogging is all about. It takes time to get it demystified. I’d say it took a solid 6 months before I grasped the power of Twitter, and what the real fundamentals of SEO were. I’m still learning that of course, but I’m not running down the wrong path, at least. If you are reading this, you obviously already grasp these fundamentals. That is half the battle. I won’t get into why Twitter is important to bloggers—enough is said about that other places.
The other half of the battle is the stuff of SEO basics: interesting writing, written for humans, in a personal voice, filled with meaningful, timely, useful advice. All the SEO tricks and tweets in the world are just a footnote after the issue of content.
So let’s say you have great content, great SEO, great exposure, and now your graphic design blog is starting to get some traffic. Great! What is a great way to measure you traffic? Well, I figured if I was growing my blog the way the other “big hitters” in the graphic design field were, I figured I’d be doing good. So I set out to figure what good Twitter growth looked like.
Poor man’s statistical analysis
What I did was simple: I copied down the number of Twitter followers that some of the graphic design bloggers that I follow had, about a month ago. I don’t follow that many people, so of those I do follow, I focused on the few that met some simple criteria, such as:
- I really liked them and their content
- I liked what they tweeted
- They tweeted often
- They posted to their blogs often
- They had a sense of humor
- I had that sense of anticipation each day to see what they’d tweet
- They had a big (to me) Twitter base and a decent number of RSS subscribers
These few criteria gave me a pretty wide cross-section of graphic design bloggers. Some new, some old, some huge, some not so huge. The most important common denominator, I’d say, was that they were busy on Twitter.
So I wrote down the number of Twitter followers for each of these bloggers in the beginning of July 2010. And then I wrote them down again today, August 4th 2010, and did some simple math:
- x = Today’s Number of Twitter Followers
- y = Number of Twitter followers from 30 days ago
- z = Percent of change in 30 days
- y/x = z
So how did my favorite graphic design bloggers / blogs fair in 30 days of Twitter growth? Take a look:
| Blog | Twitter ID | Twitter Followers July 1st, 2010 | Twitter Followers Aug 4th, 2010 | Percent of Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logobird | @logobird | 571 | 752 | +32% |
| Drawar | @drawar | 3809 | 4209 | +10% |
| Smashing Magazine | @smashingmag | 210554 | 224331 | +7% |
| Logo of the Day | @logooftheday | 1245 | 1314 | +6% |
| Logo Design Love | @logodesignlove | 7708 | 8100 | +5% |
| Brian Hoff | @behoff | 14632 | 15260 | +4% |
| BonFX | @dbonneville | 213 | 221 | +4% |
| David Airey | @davidairey | 12060 | 12443 | +3% |
| Just Creative Design | @justcreative | 29279 | 30030 | +2.5% |
I don’t know about you, but I find the data really interesting.
So, how fast should my Twitter followers be growing?
I mixed my own data for BonFX in the chart. As you can see, as a relative Twitter and blogging newbie, I don’t have many Twitter followers. But look at David Airey or Jacob Cass (Just Creative Design). They both, in the last 30 days, have a slightly lower growth rate than mine. But I’d sure like to have their numbers! Of course 30 days isn’t a very big sample. I’m sure this rate goes up and down as Twitter and blog activity ebbs and flows throughout the weeks and months with project and schedules and vacations and life in general. I’m not collecting data like Google, but you can see the point: everyone on the list added more followers last month than I have total, including those with a slower growth rate than mine.
Can we draw a meaningful conclusion then or not?
Flunk me out of stats class—I don’t care! But here is what I think is good advice based on my little-layman-analysis. Percentage wise, if you are growing 3% to 7% a month, you are on par with some pretty well known bloggers and their growth rates.
Like interest on your cash in the bank, a slow steady growth rate can yield big dividends if you are patient, and just keep doing the hard work of what is right: write good content and tweet interesting tweets over a long period of time. Period.
The point is this: Twitter growth is relative. It seems quite clear that the bigger you get, the bigger you get. Look at Smashing Magazine. They added 14k followers in 30 days. That’s about 500 new followers a day. They are doing something right!
And what is the lesson on getting bigger and wider in regards to your audience? Great content on your blogs and interesting tweets will keep people coming back and spreading the word.
So, take what you will from this! Your mileage may vary. I do this kind of thing from time to time because it’s fun, and a little inspiring. What do you think?
And hey, looks like we could all send a round of applause to Duane over at Logobird for an incredible 32% growth rate over the last 30 days! Congratulations!
Hi Douglas, thanks for the mention. I am flattered to be included with the likes of yourself and the other blogs mentioned above.
My relatively high Twitter growth over the past month can be attributed to a couple of things. Firstly, I ran a competition on my blog this month to win a free copy of David Airey’s book, Logo Design Love. One way readers could enter the competition was to follow me on Twitter and tweet the post. The effect of this was multiplied by David being kind enough to retweet my post, and also post it on his Facebook fanpage (which has 17K followers). That giveaway alone led to an extra 100+ new followers.
Secondly, just yesterday I attended a workshop here in Melbourne run by Darren Rowse (aka Problogger). Following the event Darren posted a list of all the twitter handles of the 150 attendees. That lead to about another 50+ new followers.
Moral of the story – giveaways are a good way to get new followers fast, and networking in the physical world can lead to growth in the online world.
Apart from those one off events, this is my Twitter strategy. First and foremost, I try and provide real value to my followers. That means I try and a lot of useful links. I also try to keep my tweet ration at around 80% professional/20% personal. That seems to be a good balance. Additionally, I try to engage with as many as my followers as possible to try and build relationships. Obviously, the more followers you get, the harder this gets – but for me so far, it has been working.
Cheers!
Hey Doug, I think what’s important with Twitter is the ratio of followers to those you’re following. It’s easy to join a “follow me I’ll follow you scheme,” but with these, the outcome is just a number — not representative of reach.
Hey Doug,
I think the statistics are flawed due to the fact that the comparison can only be made between accounts of similar age.
So if you are a new blog, the growth rate should be somewher around 30% while for an already established blogger/personality it would be around 4-5%.
Also while doing such an analysis try to avoid outliers like @smashingmag. They would do great as your personal target, but for analysis, they only skew it.
But as David says, the biggger picture is the reach/influence. While there are analytical tools for that, it all boils down to your quality of tweets, twitter follower/follwing ratio, and your public perception in twitterverse.
@Duane:
“…giveaways are a good way to get new followers fast…”
Ah, sage advice! Well, I have followed your for a while because you do in fact always have interesting tweets. I don’t know what your growth rate was before, but I know, because I kept a mental tally of it this past month, your numbers were in the 400-500’s for spell. I thought the huge jump was interesting and it’s great to hear the story why.
@ David:
The follow-me follow-you thing is a mystery to me. I did notice quite a wide variety among people that I follow and come across but don’t follow. I tend to place less trust in people, either unfairly or instinctively, in those with a 1:1 ratio. I’m careful to watch that bias, but for the most part, it say to me that the growth is not really organic, but mechanical.
For instance, I RT’d someone with a large following a few weeks ago. I found the person is a search I had set up. I immediately got a “thanks for the RT” and “I auto follow!” message. This person has a 1:1 ratio pretty much, and with 50k followers I thought, well, that the response was impersonal. There are legitimate ways to have a 1:1 ratio I suppose, but it always strikes me as on the shallow side, since I know you can’t really track that many people.
@ Tuhin Kumar
“…the comparison can only be made between accounts of similar age.”
I don’t see why new accounts should have 30% growth rate, but I do see why anyone with steady content and tweets would have a more or less stable growth rate. I tend not to follow people with low numbers instinctively because of a “wait and see” mentality.
“…established blogger/personality it would be around 4-5%.”
Yes, but how do you define established? I would not say that having huge numbers means you are established. I would think, on the contrary, that a steady and measured track record of posts and tweets over at least 6 months to a year would automatically establish someone. They are just established at a lower volume of traffic or followers if they haven’t spent time to promote their work. Promotion or not, I see the creation of useful content over a span of time as the key indicator. I could be wrong, but that is what I look for before I follow someone for the most part.
I think the “reach / influence” argument is the strongest, but you can only establish that on a foundation of previous hard work on your blog. While anyone, noting Duane above, can have a big spike from time to time (especially when Smashing Mag RTs you!), my working hypothesis is that good content and good tweets over a sustained period of time will always translate into a humble yet powerful rate of growth.
Interesting insight… you should also check out http://twitteranalyzer.com – will make it easier next time. For further Twitter resources, check my bookmarks too:
http://delicious.com/justcreative/twitter
Here’s to getting back over 3% growth! Thanks for the mention and post!
@ Jacob:
Thanks for the resource – twitteranalyzer.com is very slick. That will most certainly make things easier. The growth rate stats on a few blogs I tried seem a little buggy – I’ll have to dig in and revisit that.
And thanks for posting your bookmarks – that is great! And good luck on the new gig!
Hey Doug,
Just thought I would chip in to the conversation again.:)
Personally, I am far more likely to ‘trust’ someone and subsequently follow them if their follower count is much higher then their following count. I look for a ratio of at least 1:2 – following to followers.
If someone is following 1000+ people, that just seems off to me. It is an indicator that the person either doesn’t understand Twitter, or is trying to game the system.
@ Duane:
Agreed. I follow about 50 people, only about 15-20 of which post routinely, of which about 10 post close to daily. I can’t catch all of their posts unless I make an effort. I created a few sublists and searches too, in TweetDeck (great UI but POKEY speed on the Mac!), so I can’t imagine how someone can really, truly follow any large number of people.
Wow, that data of the increase in followers over a month is definitely interesting. I don’t know that it actually has any impact on someone’s blog, unless those Twitter followers are actively engaging on the site as well, but still very interesting nonetheless.