A blog on weaponizing Twitter fav to win over people. Enjoy and provide feedback to the author.

Charles Jo 650.906.2600 charlesjo

http://blog.tommaxwell.me/post/106984979508/reciprocation-as-a-tool-on-twitter#.VKedXtm9Kc3

Reciprocation As A Tool On Twitter

Friday, January 2, 2015

I was browsing through the archive of Semil Shah’s blog earlier — one I read regularly — and found myself particularly fascinated by this review of Marc Andreessen’s 2014 on Twitter. In it, you see large numbers for pretty much every metric that quantifies activity on the social network — number of tweets, of favorites, of accounts followed, you get the idea. He’s even behind a new user-created “feature” in the form of the tweetstorm. Marc in 2014 alone tweeted nearly the same amount of times (~41,000) as I have since I signed up 6 years ago, and I consider myself to be a pretty heavy user. To say he took Twitter by storm would be an understatement. But what interests me more most is what Semil has to say about reciprocity:

He’s [Marc] favorited a tweet well over 100,000 times. All of those people who tweeted got a receipt that Marc has read their tweet. Small, but powerful, and reinforces reciprocity, which is a core tenet of building influence over time.

Everyone has their own use for the favorite (or “fav”) button attached to every tweet, a signal that is nuanced just like real life emotions and the expression of them are, but I think the “read receipt” is why I favorite so many tweets. And I think it’s safe to say I do in fact favorite a lot of tweets, as I get these kind of messages directed at me often:

It’s a minuscule gesture, but one that notifies the person on the receiving end that they are being heard by someone. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us that listening can make people like you more — Dale Carnegie and Abraham Maslow together made that famously clear. Favoriting tweets also of course pushes your name into the notification feeds of others which can of course lead to a bigger network and that increased influence that Semil mentions. If there’s anything I’m going to try and adjust about my Twitter usage this year after seeing Marc’s stats it’ll be increasing my replies-to-broadcasting ratio; more replies, less broadcasting of my own mumblings. I’m also giving myself some rope to increase my following count. In the past I’ve kept it at the 300 people I trust with pushing smart content into my feed, but I think I can keep up with a little bit more now. 😉

(I also want to meet more of the people I engage with regularly on Twitter over the next few weeks while I’m in the SF Bay and have some in-depth conversations. If that sounds cool, DM me.)

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