{"id":32662,"date":"2014-05-07T23:14:04","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T23:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/i-know-this-is-an-old-piece-but-i-wanted-to-let\/"},"modified":"2014-05-07T23:14:04","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T23:14:04","slug":"i-know-this-is-an-old-piece-but-i-wanted-to-let","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/i-know-this-is-an-old-piece-but-i-wanted-to-let\/","title":{"rendered":"I know this is an old piece but I wanted to let you know I enjoyed it.    &#8220;Re blogs and content sharing on Tumblr: a personal network analysis&#8221;- I am very interested in the &#8220;tipping point&#8221; of tumblr blogs. ie how many followers to you need before your followers begin to generate exponentially? How do you find the &#8220;connectors&#8221; and &#8220;influencers&#8221; on Tumblr? Its all interesting stuff but quite hard to track! thanks- E"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/hautepop.tumblr.com\/post\/85064569667\/i-know-this-is-an-old-piece-but-i-wanted-to-let\">hautepop<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Digging into my Ask box and responding to very old questions &#8211; this one on <a href=\"http:\/\/hautepop.tumblr.com\/post\/38101923148\/reblogs-and-content-sharing-on-tumblr-a-personal\">this post doing a little network analysis of reblogs<\/a> from Dec 2012<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. How many followers do you need before your followers increase exponentially?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a tricky one &#8211; mostly because Tumblr doesn\u2019t make follower counts public on people\u2019s blogs or in the API, so it\u2019s fairly impossible to do objective research. What I can say though is that follower numbers matter a lot less than your position within Tumblr social networks &#8211; that is, it\u2019s about community.<\/p>\n<p>When I say community, this can mean self-identifing communities such as TV fandoms or Feminist Tumblr (ok, lots of communities within Feminist Tumblr!) However, it\u2019s not the self-identification as part of a community that\u2019s what really matters. What\u2019s actually important is the habitual pattern of who interacts with who through reblogging and commenting on each others\u2019 posts. It\u2019s community <a href=\"https:\/\/econsultancy.com\/blog\/63723-how-to-find-communities-online-using-social-network-analysis\">as defined by social network analysis<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Become a part of a really active community, put a lot of time into writing good posts, following people and reblogging &#8211; and your follower count could increase very rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, having loads of followers doesn\u2019t necessarily get you anywhere. I\u2019m a great example! So I have 164,00 followers because I was Tumblr tech listed &amp; recommended to new users on sign-up. That gave me 250 new followers per day. Now that\u2019s stopped, I get maybe 5? Two main reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Essentially all the people who followed me were newbies with zero network power (and most of them probably stopped using Tumblr really quickly), so they provide no network advantage to spreading my posts.<\/li>\n<li>I don\u2019t really participate in any Tumblr communities so I am relatively marginal within the network.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(My network power is much stronger on Twitter despite far fewer followers &#8211; but that\u2019s another post\u2026)<\/p>\n<p><strong>2. How do you find the connectors and influencers on Tumblr?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I said, with no publicly visible follower counts, there\u2019s no easy way to do this. You can do it through social network analysis, collecting a big pool of posts and analysing who reblogs who. However, you need proper social media research resources to do this (API access, some Python skills, and use of programs like NodeSQL or Gephi). This happens to be my job &#8211; but I work alongside a developer team to do the data wrangling.<\/p>\n<p>But all is not lost! From the principles of network analysis we can draw out some rules of thumb that can provide pretty good proxy methods for finding these super-connectors in the Tumblr niche you want to be part of. So:<\/p>\n<p>1. <strong>Look at a Tumblr post you like\/admire<\/strong>, and expand the list of notes so you can see everyone who faved &amp; reblogged it. Posts with 100+ notes are most useful here, as are ones where a bit of a \u201creblog conversation\u201d has gone on.<\/p>\n<p>2. Looking at the message body, make a note of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>original author<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>rebloggers<\/strong> who\u2019ve added comments that have then become part of the \u2018reblog tree\u2019 discussion<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>3. Looking at the list of notes for the \u201cA reblogged B\u201d format, identify <strong>which Tumblr users seem to have been reblogged the most<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4. Repeat this for 10-20 more posts<\/strong>, so you\u2019ve got a pool of 50+ names. Are any names starting to recur? This indicates they\u2019ve got high \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/faculty.ucr.edu\/~hanneman\/nettext\/C10_Centrality.html\">network centrality<\/a>&ldquo; &#8211; that means influence.<\/p>\n<p>5. Take the list of names you\u2019ve got (heavily-reblogged original authors and popular rebloggers) and <strong>go to their Tumblrs to see what\u2019s going on<\/strong>. Check out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The note count on their original posts (if they make any): what kind of engagement are they getting?<\/li>\n<li>Their follower count (some people do list it in bios, and of course the more influential are more likely to brag!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This will help you rank your list of names.<\/p>\n<p><strong>6. Iterate the process.<\/strong> Look at the Tumblrs of the top 10 most influential people you\u2019ve identified, and explore who they\u2019re reblogging, who\u2019s mentioned in their posts, and who\u2019s heavily reblogged in their Notes.<\/p>\n<p>Add these people to your Influentials list.<\/p>\n<p><strong>7. Follow the people you think are really interesting<\/strong>. They might not necessarily be the most influential ones on the list &#8211; but you\u2019ll have a better chance of making a connection to them if you think alike.<\/p>\n<p>Bonus step 8: <br \/><strong>To get influential users to interact with you<\/strong>, the best way is probably to reblog something they\u2019ve written, adding an interesting comment or question on the bottom of it. They\u2019ll be pretty likely to reply &amp; check you out, creating the opportunity for them to decide to follow you.<\/p>\n<p>People also use Ask boxes to make themselves known to others and build relationships &#8211; but you do need to have something more interesting to say than \u201cPlease will you follow me back?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>What do you reckon, Social Network Analysis Tumblr? How\u2019s my heuristic? Anything I\u2019ve missed out?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><p>nice.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>hautepop: Digging into my Ask box and responding to very old questions &#8211; this one on this post doing a little network analysis of reblogs from Dec 2012 1. How many followers do you need before your followers increase exponentially? That\u2019s a tricky one &#8211; mostly because Tumblr doesn\u2019t make follower counts public on people\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8uO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}