Freakonomics and Twitter

I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast about Twitter last week that dealt with the Following to Followed ratio and I decided to experiment a little bit. I wanted to see if I went out and followed as many people as I could how many people would feel obligated to follow back.

At the time of the experiment @P_HillBookCub had about 30 something followers and I was following about 9 people/groups. (The 30 followers is higher than expected since I only post maybe five comments a year.)

Step one of the experiment was to click "Follow" to whoever Twitter recommended no matter what. This in itself was pretty fascinating. Watching the recommended list smoothly transition from comedians to republican and conservative figures to democrat and liberal figures to members of the World Wrestling Federation to the NBA to the NFL to Hip Hop artists to Pop.

Twenty minutes later @P_HillBookClub was following 1,200 people/groups. By the next morning about 200 of those 1200 had reciprocated.

@P_HillBookClub is now followed by 229 people. All of whom, I'm sure, spend as much time reading my Tweets as I spend reading theirs. Which is never. Which is fine since that's also about as often as I Tweet.