St. Kilda followers on Twitter
I’m currently busily nagging a friend into building me a nice little tool to extract follower information from AFL related accounts. It will require a number of runs before it is perfected. Today, we did a test run on stkildafc. (The programmer helping me barracks for St. Kilda. Hence, we are looking at them today.) There are a number of bugs and we didn’t get a complete data set but I’ll talk about the results anyway as we extracted information from about half the followers: We have some information for 2,397 followers out of 4,145 total.
The average number of followers a St. Kilda follower has based on that sample? 3169. Average number of people they are following? 3233. Those numbers seems absurdly highly. That’s because you have 142 of them with 10,000+ followers. You’ve also got 15 with 100,000+ followers: MagicSauceMedia, Dillanos_VP, SanMarcoCoffee, mauricefreedman, wishnie, MarcDeCaria, darrenwilliger, dollars5, socialmediamind, WeBlogtheWorld, PleasureEllis, pramitjnathan, rleseberg, Wakooz_RSS, DesignerDepot, clatko. If you remove those with 100,000+ followers, you get the average number of people a St. Kilda follower is following down to 2258. If you remove the people who have 10,000+ followers, you get the average number of number of followers a St. Kilda follower has down to 247. That number is much more realistic.
The number of people following is one of those problem parts of my data set. (We’re still refining this data collecting. This will get more accurate with time.) We only have information for 2,293 as compared to 2,397. Of those, 13 are following more than 100,000 people. (They’ll never see St. Kilda updates. Can’t follow 100,000 people.) If those 13 are taken out, the average number of people that a St. Kilda follower is following is 2388. If we take out the people who are following more than 10,000 people, the average number of people they are following is 350. This number appears more realistic. Oh and those followers? 93 of them are following only the St. Kilda Saints. 51 of them are just following the Saints plus one other account. The median number of people that they follow is 81.
Most St. Kilda fans aren’t following and being follow by all that many people. There are a few people who heavily skew the average.
The average number of status updates for a St. Kilda follower? 1044. 49 people have updated more than 10,000 times. If we take them out, we get an average number of updates of 539. If we get rid of the 460 people who have updated 0 or 1 time and those with 10,000+, the average number of updates is 671. On the whole though, when you have 460 people who have updated 0 or 1 time, that is a huge population of people not updating on Twitter…
One of the other stats that were pulled involved getting the language code. (What language do you view Twitter in.) Most of these are English with a few exceptions: 3 DE, 9 ES, 1 FR, 3 JP. Most of St. Kilda’s fans opt for English as their native language.
In their profile descriptions, 23 mention St. Kilda and 32 mention the Saints. A few of the latter obviously are confused bots or people who can’t tell the St. Kilda Saints apart from the New Orleans Saints.
If I just filter the location down to require that they mention Kilda, there are only four. That isn’t many people. When I get the location tool fixed, I should be able to get a better idea of what is going on with where they are from. (I have an If location field says this, then that means they live in City, State, Country. This only ran for about 100 people before it broke. Otherwise, I would discuss this more.)
I’ll do another similar analysis when I get more data. The tool needs to be refined but the insights I begin to see what followers look like are fascinating.
A copy of the raw data referenced in this post can be found here: StKilda.xls.