A Decade on Twitter

I joined Twitter in August of 2008. My emphasis has been mainly on #cancerSC and #OpenAccess. For several years, I've used Twitter, rather than this blog, as a means for providing information about selected recent research on cancer stem cells. How much attention has been paid to these tweets?

I currently have 965 followers on Twitter. The recently-acquired followers appear to be either scientists, or people who have no obvious interest in either #cancerSC or #OpenAccess. Is 965 a satisfactory number of followers? Neither of the main foci of my Twitter posts can be regarded as mainstream topics, so my modest target has been 1000 followers. The total is almost there (after a decade!). A substantial proportion of those followers who identify themselves as scientists mention an interest in stem cells and/or regenerative medicine. Fewer reveal any interest in Open Access. I cannot provide any useful quantitative information about the individual interests of all 965 followers, because of major uncertainties about how best to classify their interests.

Perhaps the attention paid to individual tweets might provide  a quantitative assessment of their impact? If so, the results are sobering. Over the past year, no tweets hashmarked #cancerSC have earned "retweets" or "likes" beyond the single digits. (A few tweets hashmarked #OpenAccess have accumulated retweets and likes beyond the single digits, but the most popular ones have been ones that I retweeted, rather than ones that I posted myself).

How to account for these rather unimpressive statistics? Several explanations come to mind.

One is that many people who become followers on Twitter don't actually look at many tweets. Also, perhaps those who do look seldom retweet them (nor indicate that they like them).

Another explanation for the apparent lack of attention is that most of the tweets are indeed uninteresting (or far too specialized) except perhaps to a very few who do find them useful.

There are other possible explanations, but perhaps it's time to ask another question. If the individual tweets have little impact, as measured by retweets and likes, why post them?

I have two main answers to this question. Firstly, these posts provide an incentive for me to keep up with current publications about cancer stem cells. The literature on all of stem cell research is too extensive for one person to manage, but a subset of particular interest isn't. Secondly, the total number of followers (965) isn't, to my mind, a trivial number {see also above).

One last question. Are most of the followers still there because they haven't bothered to unfollow, or because they occasionally find some tweets to be of interest, or because they are interested in the author of the tweets? No relevant data. Don't know.

Best wishes for 2019!