Web Design Blog Follow Me Icons
Twitter is rising to become the king of social media. Twitter has the power to drive huge amounts of traffic and is an easy way for people to receive site updates. Certain users, such as Mashable, are racking up huge Twitter followings, with there tweets going out to hundreds of thousands of people. This got me interested in how sites were creating such large followings. I came to the conclusion that the top three factors (aside from traffic) that influence a sites Twitter following is the creativity of their Twitter “follow me” image, its size, and how active they are on Twitter. To test my hypothesis, I am conducting the Twitter Experiment. For this experiment, I am going to take 7 sites and rank their method of capturing followers on a scale from 1 to 10 based on three categories. The categories will be updates, creativity and size. I am then going to use trafficestimate.com to get an estimate to use for each sites traffic. I will then divide each sites 30 day traffic estimate by their number of Twitter followers to get what I call the Twitter Traffic ratio. The lower the ratio, the more effective the site is at attracting followers per visitor. After I am finished with my rankings, I will see how well my predictions compare to the real results.
My Rankings
1.
Followers: 25,132
Updates: 10
Creativity: 9
Size:6
Total Score: 25
Traffic Estimate : 4,608,300 in the last 30 days
2.
Followers:4,335
Updates:10
Creativity:4
Size: 10
Total Score: 24
Traffic Estimate: 391,300 in the last 30 days
Bittbox does not have a twitter icon but uses a twitter widget to display recent updates and ask for a follow.
3.
Followers:700
Updates:10
Creativity:4
Size: 4
Total Score: 18
Traffic Estimate: 36,500 visits in the previous 30 days.
4.
Followers:26,716
Updates: 7
Creativity: 1
Size: 6
Total Score: 14
Traffic Estimate: 5,605,400 visits in the previous 30 days.
5.
Followers: 1,730
Updates: 3
Creativity: 1
Size: 4
Total Score: 8
Traffic Estimate: 427,900 in the last 30 days
Followers:386
Updates:4
Creativity:1
Size: 1
Total Score:6
Traffic Estimate: 54,600 visits in the previous 30 days
Followers:327
Updates:1
Creativity:1
Size:1
Total Score: 3
Traffic Estimate:267,600 visits in the previous 30 days
Actual Rankings (Based on Twitter Traffic Ratio, the lower the ratio the better the site is at recruiting followers when traffic is considered)
1.
Brian Yerkes
Twitter Traffic Ratio: 52
Our rank: #3
2.
Bittbox
Twitter Traffic Ratio:90
Our rank:#2
3.
Highresolutiontextures
Twitter Traffic Ratio:141
Our rank:#6
4.
Smashingmagazine
Twitter Traffic Ratio: 183
Our rank: #1
5.
Sitepoint
Twitter Traffic Ratio:209
Our rank:#4
6.
Smashingapps
Twitter Traffic Ratio: 250
Our rank: #5
7.
Designdisease.com
Twitter Traffic Ratio: 818
Our rank: #7
Overall, I was impressed at how accurately I was able to predict how effective each site was at gaining followers per visitor. This shows that the size, creativity of your “follow me icon” as well as how often you update, play a huge part in how many people follow you on Twitter. In my rankings, I underestimated the effectiveness of bittbox.com’s follow me widget. Although it was lacking in creativity, the widget is enormous compared to the other follow buttons, and the size should have been rated a 15/10. If you are looking to increase your Twitter following, I think this proves that a Twitter widget is very effective. Smashingmagazines rank really surprised me, I thought their creative icon and frequent updates would result in a higher Twitter traffic ratio. One explanation could be that unlike their RSS feed which is featured prominently at the top, their Twitter icon is at the very bottom of their sidebar. In conclusion, if you are looking to increase your Twitter following you need to get a BIG “follow me” bird or widget, make it creative, and update frequently!
And, don’t forget to
April 15th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Hey this is a great list.
Here are also some good Twitter icons from famous illustrators http://www.inspiredm.com/2009/04/12/the-social-bird-icon-set-the-first-inspired-release/
April 18th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Very interesting experiment. I think one major aspect of my personal stats on twitter/site visits etc…is to do with the large number of followers/twitter friends that not only retweet my updates, but also “followfriday” my name around quite a bit.
Thank you for the mention, interesting post
January 12th, 2010 at 5:57 am
thanks for the list, you have some great icons here..