Gain More Twitter Followers With 140 Characters Of Cheer

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Perhaps your Klout score is looking a little drab these days, or maybe the virtual reality of social media is your actual reality and you feel the need for more online friends/worshipper. Regardless of your motivation, the George Institute of Technology just released a new study that aims to help you boost your twitter-follower count.

Twitter is the social network on which witty people thrive: the more clever your tweets, the more favorites you receive and the more followers you gain. How many scintillating ideas can you squeeze into 140 characters?

Followers are Twitter’s most basic currency,” assistant professor Eric Gilbert explained. “Yet little is understood about how to grow such an audience.

Previous studies indicated that the key to twitter fame was actually fame itself—following, and being followed by, celebrities was the fastest track to successful tweeting.

But according to this new Georgia Tech study, cheer is now the latest trend to use to garner favor among the twitter masses.

During their 15-month study, Gilbert and his team considered the emotional vibes as well as networking and social content of over half a million tweets posted by more than 500 twitter users.

For the first time,” he said, “we were able to explore the relative effects of social behavior, message content and network structure and show which of these factors has more influence on the number of Twitter followers.

The team will present their findings at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in France later this week, where Gilbert hopes they will be publicized and used to help cultivate social media influence.

By examining multiple factors that affect tie formation and dissolution over time on Twitter, we’ve discovered information that could help technologists design and build tools that help users grow their audiences,” Gilbert said.

His recommendations?

Steer clear of self-centered tweets. At least in this case, smart is the new sexy, and twitter users who tweet information tidbits gather followers 30 times as quickly as users who tweet a lot of personal content. So next time you want to share with the Twittersphere that you miss purple ketchup, consider adding a factual statistic about the colored condiment into your thought.

Also be careful not to overdose on hashtags. You know the type: “Not sure how this works so #hashtagingeverything #and #i #do #mean #everything #twitterlove4ever.” A high hashtag-to-wordcount ratio attracts less followers (for obvious reasons.)

Finally: be happy. Just as people love a smiling face, social networkers flock to positivity.