Three weeks in ahead of target!

Three weeks in ahead of target!

Three weeks into my challenge to obtain 20,000 followers on Twitter within a year, and I am ahead of target.
So as can be seen from the screenshot, I am currently standing at 1695 followers.  Last week this figure was 1216, so that is a gain of 479 over the last 7 days.
This is an average gain of 68 per day.  Still above the target figure of 56 required to reach the target.

Reduction in follow rate

Week 2's average daily follow rate was 101 per day, so it is disappointing that week 3 has seen a 30% reduction!
The daily new follow graph also shows a similar trend:
The average figures is markedly down from that of the previous week.

What's caused the reduction

At the end of week 2's update I reported that Twitter had imposed a write-bar on my custom script.
This was a major setback as I was using this script to follow people - without the ability to follow, it seriously hampered the number of follows I got back.
Late on Monday evening the bar was lifted but only upon my agreement that I would not auto-follow anymore.
As I don't want a complete script ban for this account I had to respect this and therefore come up with a different method.
As my people to follow search was giving good follow back results I did not want to lose this, so decided that rather than auto-follow I will write all the users to a list, and then use the normal Twitter application to follow these accounts manually.
At the same time the accounts will be manually removed from the list.
Yes, it is much more manual clicking, but I feel this will yield good results.

Further write-ban!

On Tuesday morning I woke up to find that my script had been blocked from writing again!
So that curtailed my list idea again.
A further support request was sent to Twitter and it seems that they viewed it was sending too many tweets with @mentions.
This was because I was also auto-thanking new followers and these had built up in a queue when the script was blocked!
The ban was finally lifted on Wednesday evening.
This in effect meant I lost 3 full days of my challenge.
Taking this into account the daily figure would be nearer 120, therefore beating week two.
Hopefully there will be no further breaks in service and we can see week four exceeding all expectations!

Social network that does not like social!

When my account was blocked for the large number of @mentions I asked Twitter what the limit is so that I could ensure I kept under it!
They responded that there was no set limit and that I should severely limit the number sent.
It therefore seems that Twitter is a social network that does not like people being social!

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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So much for the doom - stocks markets end week higher!

So much for the doom - stocks markets end week higher!

Don't you just love all the doom and gloom headlines, after Wednesday's stock market falls around the world!

"Dow Jones suffers steep fall and FTSE 100 in bear market" - The Guardian, UK

From horrible to just bad: Dow ends down 249 points  - money.CNN.com

Stock markets plunge as investors fear global economic slowdown - The Guardian, UK

Never before has Wall Street gotten off to a worse start to a year - US News

And many many others.

Whilst it's true stocks markets around the world have a taken a battering this year, I think it is important to reflect on the wider context than a single days worth of trading!

So let's look at what has happened to the FTSE 100 and Dow Jones indexes this week:

FTSE 100

So looking at this graph we can see on Tuesday we saw the FTSE 100 rise in value. 

We then saw the bad day of Wednesday that generated all the bad press.

Thursday and Friday then saw further gains made.

The end result being that the index actually ended the week higher than it started the week, thereby gaining all the value (and more) that was lost on the Wednesday to forget!

Dow Jones

Looking at the graph for the Dow Jones index over the same week period, we can see that it mirrors what happened with the FTSE 100 Index.

That is, gains on Tuesday, big loss on Wednesday, followed by gains on Thursday and Friday.  With the index ending the week higher than it started at!

What next for the headline makers?

Whilst it is true these indexes are trading significantly below their peaks of last year, is it time the headline makers ignore big signal day falls and take a slightly wider view of the markets?

Are we entering a period of large volatility in the indexes, where we can see large falls one day followed by recovery (and more) the next?

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Two weeks in - API Write Bar!

Two Weeks in - API Write Bar!

So two weeks into my challenge to obtain 20,000 followers on Twitter within a year!

Current position

The follower count this week has increased from 508 to 1216!

So that's a gain of 708 over 7 days or 101 per day.  This is good, as it exceeds the figure of 56 per day required to achieve the goal!  At this rate the target should be achieved in just over half the time.

Breakdown per day

How has this follower increased worked out per day?


Clearly we are seeing some churn to our figures, as each day has seen a minimum of 101 new followers, which many days significantly higher, yet the average per day is only 101. 

I will have to play with my home-grown code to see if I can track who leaves and see if there are any trends, so that I can keep the retention rate high.

How have we generated these followers?

This week we have changed the custom script to follow 3 new found profiles on each run (20 minute interval).  Thereby following 216 accounts per day, so with an average per day growth of 101, it can be seen that the hit rate is just under 50%.

Problems this week

The custom script generates a "Thank You for following" tweet, for each 4 followers and was scheduled to set these at 12pm daily. 

However this meant with a large number of followers, I was sending a maximum of 40 of these tweets during the runs that had the hour of 12pm, thereby resulting in 120 of these going out over lunchtime daily. 

I think this may have annoyed a few of the followers resulting in them unfollowing the account. 

Without the churn analytics this is only a guess.  Churn analytics seems quite a high priority for the script.

This script has now been changed to send 1 tweet to the 4 new followers on the next run after it reaches 4 new followers, thereby reducing the amount of tweeting to 1 tweet per 20 minutes thanking followers,  whilst this ultimately will result in the same number of tweets over a 24 period, it seems much more acceptable to my followers to drip feed it.

A similar problem would exist on a Friday with my Follow Friday tweets, so this has also been adjusted to do the same on a Friday.  Any tweets not sent within this period will automatically be held over to the next Friday and become the first ones to go that week.

API Write Bar

Since 04.45 on 22 January Twitter has barred my API authorisation from writing, i.e. following new accounts, sending tweets etc..  I can still do searches etc., but it seriously curtails its function!
This has been picked up in my logfile:



I can only think that they have not liked the fact that I bulk sent a load of thank you tweets, due to the problem outlined above.

I have contacted support and am awaiting a reply to get the API reinstated. 

Meanwhile I can still work on other aspects of my script (that use read functionally) and also carry on with the actions I have been doing, but these will have to be on a manual basis - A right pain in the neck!

I do wish twitter would have better API documentation to allow people to understand ALL the limits before coding scripts, rather than barring accounts and then require you to beg to get it reinstated! 

Hopefully they will action my request with minimal delay!

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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One week in!

One week in!

So one week into my challenge to obtain 20,000 followers on Twitter within a year!

Current position

The follower count has increased from 15 to 508!

So that's a gain of 493 over 7 days or 70 per day.  This is good, as it exceeds the figure of 56 per day required to achieve the goal!

Breakdown per day

How has this follower increased worked out per day?

So in the main, the follower count has gradually increased to settle around the 80 per day mark.

How have we generated these followers?

We have built a custom script around the public Twitter API (Application Program Interface) that essentially performs multiple searches on Twitter looking for certain accounts that meet my criteria, when these are found the script follows 2 of them in the hope that they also follow the account back.
As can be seen from the counts in the first picture above, current counts are:

So we are following 833 accounts but only 508 have followed back, I.e. a response rate of 61%.  However this includes accounts that I have also manually followed, so a better test would be to dive into the database behind my script.  This gives figures of:

So based on figures of 226 and 593 we have a success rate of 38%.  

My scripts runs 3 times an hour, 24 hours a day, so I am therefore following an additional 144 people a day, so with a strike date of 38% this gives 55 people a day!

Our target is 56 so we are very close to the required figure - clearly we will have to monitor this over the next few weeks and try and make the strike rate a little higher!

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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The Challenge Is Set!

The Challenge Is Set!

Yesterday my wife, set me the challenge to see if I can gain 20,000 followers on Twitter by the end of 2016.

So not being one to give up on a challenge I decided why not, let's give it a go!

The Twitter Handle and Hashtag

So first things, first let's come up with a twitter handle and for good measure lets decide on a hashtag so that any tweets I send can reference it. 

So @TwentykFollow twitter handle is born along with the hashtag #20kfollow

Starting to gain followers

Yesterday was spent setting up the account, bio and logos etc..  I also started to follow amfew random people who by the profiles looked as though they would follow back, I.e. had a following count similar to that of their follower count. 

I have also plugged the account into my homegrown open-source Twitter API interface program, to allow me to auto-semd thank you for following tweets (with the hashtag #TopFollowers) along with similar ones on a Friday with the hashtags #FF and #FollowFriday

At the to!e of writing this has resulted in a follow count of 15, so still a long way to go!

Follow Rate

There are 359 days left in 2016 (from yesterday) so to gain 20,000 followers in a year I need to gain 56 followers a day, so the current count of 15 on day 1 needs to increase by a large amount to achieve the goal!

Other Plans

Clearly we are going to have to significantly up the follow rate per day if this account is going to achieve its goal.  Manual following of random people is not going to achieve the goal quickly enough.  I therefore think I am going to write me own twitter API that will search out people to follow rather than rely on a manual approach.  I will limit this to a suitable number per day and base it in follower and following counts of user ids.  I think I will also experiment with these figures and monitor the follow back rate so as to come up with the most efficeint scenario.

Using existing tools to gain followers

I can hear all my readers saying, but why don't you use the free/paid for tools online that say they will gain you 10,000 followers in a short space of time, well the reason I don't want to is two fold:

My account, my effort

Firstly, its my account and I want to show I can manage it without outside influence from pre-written tools.  I want to showcase my skills.

Risk of suspension

Without spending a lot of time researching each of the online tools, it is not clear how they gather these followers, particularly if they do it in an aggressive manner, thus bringing the account in front of the eyes of Twitter, resulting in either temporary or permanent suspension.

I am sure most of the tools are OK to use, but our of personal choice I don't want to use them.

So what now

Please keep checking back to this blog on a weekly basis and see how well I am progressing with my quest to gain 20,000 twitter followers in a year!

I intend to post to this blog each Friday evening (GMT timezone).

Don't forget to follow @TwentykFollow on Twitter and tell all your friends to do the same!

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you back here soon!

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