Steem Statistics: Correlation between number of posts and number of followers

in #steem6 years ago (edited)

Greater user engagement correlates with greater follower counts!


Hi all, I have recently been playing around with the Steem blockchain data using @arcange's SteemSQL (which I highly recommend for the data-centric minds out there!), and I decided to just take a look at how the level of user engagement correlates with the number of that user's followers. Of course the general trend is fairly intuitive: increasing your level of engagement on Steemit (as evidenced by increased number of posts and comments) leads to more awareness of your blog and increased numbers of followers.

It turns out, that the correlation between total number of posts and total number of followers does show that behavior, and (slightly surprisingly to me), the best-fit trend to fit the data is actually a power-law relationship. The correlation is not exceptionally strong with an R^2 value of 0.40492, although note that R^2 values less than 0.5 are fairly common when it comes to studying human behavior, especially in the cases of social media type platforms where there are significant outliers in terms of numbers of followers and/or post counts. This is further exacerbated by the presence of bots that auto-follow and/or auto-post, leading to even more outliers in the data. Nonetheless, it does seem like the correlation is still reasonable despite the significant outliers, and I believe the conclusion is fairly obvious (and supported by the data!).

Conclusion: If you want more followers.... increase your level of engagement on Steemit!

postsVsFollowers.png

Methodology:


If you are a new programmer, or just interested in the methodology for performing such a search using SteemSQL, this is the code used to grab the data from the SQL server:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import pymssql
import sys

server = "vip.steemsql.com"
user = "Steemit-trogdor"
password = "*****************"
database = "DBSteem"

conn = pymssql.connect(server, user, password, database)
cursor = conn.cursor()

cursor.execute("SELECT Accounts.name,MAX(Accounts.post_count),COUNT(Followers.follower) FROM Accounts WITH (NOLOCK) INNER JOIN Followers ON Accounts.name=Followers.following GROUP BY Accounts.name")
row = cursor.fetchone()

while row:
print(row[0] + ", " + str(row[1]) + ", " + str(row[2]))
row = cursor.fetchone()

I then filtered out results with less than 10 posts and/or 10 followers to remove the new/unused accounts.

Let me know if you found this interesting, and if you need any help with searches of your own, of if you are interested in any other data, just let me know!

Best,
Trogdor :)

Sort:  

See now you back up your post with all that fancy book learnin' and numbers.

This a social media site, give me cat pictures, memes, and russian backed propaganda and keep your facts to yourself :p

But seriously, being more active is a great way to gain followers. Not to mention actually interacting with those who comment on your posts which is an area you excel at, which is why I continue to follow you.

Thanks, yeah I try to upvote people who comment on my posts as long as it's not obvious spam. Since not a lot of people are actually interested in stuff like this, I figure it's one of my main ways to keep people coming back haha

The dynamics at play on a site like this are certainly interesting. I’m curious if you’ve noticed any changes in the data as Steem has become more popular and as it has become more profitable to be active in the community. This is my first post so if I’m rehashing something previously discussed you’ll have to forgive me.

Buenas tardes, gracias por esta información te voy a seguir para estar informada de todo lo que publicas, ya que conoces mucho del tema, soy nueva en steemit y poco a poco voy conociendo mas de esta comunidad gracias por compartir información sobre steemit, feliz dia...

yes @trogdor
many are giving junk comments, but for me beginners, I am very important information about how to post, how to upvote, when I see your post, I am very interested, because you can be my teacher, can be my role model
Thank you very much @trogdor

thank you
I will follow you, I am beginner by following you, I will be more inspired and know what I should do @fingolfin

Engage, follow, squat, click
REPEAT CADET !

Yep the data confirms what many of us already know and what I tell new users. To have any kind of "success" here you have to be active. I've seen some pretty big YouTubers drop content here but not gain any traction because they weren't putting in the work. It's a social app and you need to engage others to get noticed and have ppl feel the need to follow you and check out your posts. That being said I'm mega active, with posting, curating and commenting but the number of followers doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more ppl viewing your posts. I'm putting on followers at a steady clip but I'm not getting any more eyes on my posts than I was months ago even tho my followers count has doubled. Not complaining though because I'm happy with my levels and I'd be willing to bet alot of my followers are dead now. Not actually dead just followed and left or stopped using Steemit. Appreciate the data @trogdor!

Yeah. I think one of the issues is that people are following so many people that loads of posts get lost in our feeds because of the way they're currently set up. I'm hoping that maybe a major rework of the user interface could be in the works. I have no idea if that's the case or not, but a lot of posts just disappear as it is.

@trogdor thank you for your post. I havent see you in a while.

Are there any tools where you can geo locate new users? I would be interested to see how steemit is propagating.

keep up the good work.

I'm not sure about that, it would be awesome if there were. You could use machine learning on everyone's posts to try to identify the users country of origin... haha, I have no idea what kind of results you could glean from that. The only alternative would be for Steemit.com to actually track IP addresses of traffic and match to users.... seems unlikely to me haha

I would be interested in seeing how steemit and it's ecosystem is spreading. Where the most users are coming from, inter-spatial connections etc.

As far as I know it's pretty world wide! :)

thank you @trogdor for your upvotes. I bought a tree and planted it. all this thanks to upvotes from people like you. I hope to reduce our foot print. I wrote a post here:

https://steemit.com/life/@intrepidsurfer/i-won-some-steem-on-ssc-so-i-bought-a-tree-and-planted-it
Thank you again.

Nice analysis, this is interesting, since I have only been on Steemit for about 11 days and I was noticing that the top posters obviously get a lot of engagement because of their consistent and valuable posts! Of course there are other factors but most important is to give consistent value to your audience, since you never know when a post can go trending.

Definitely I agree, thanks for reading!

Excellent very good information, of course it helped me a lot since I want to get more followers

Thanks for reading!

Very good information very interesting, I would like to have many followers

Thanks for reading!

wow @trogdor your analysis is very interesting, interesting and very useful, whether posts and followers affect the popularity of an account? I am very interested to follow you I wait for your next posting

Thanks for reading!

Despite this conclusion could come from common sense, it is quite interesting to take a look at the actual data :D thanks for sharing your job with us!

Thanks for reading!

Definitely I agree with you. If you want more followers, you need more online. This is how it works. There is a saying in Turkey; It is called '' 3 balls and 5 meatballs ''. In short, you have to sacrifice if you want to get something. Thanks for sharing @trogdon

Thanks for reading!

You're welcome. Thanks for sharing

Very interesting your post, thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. @trogdor

Thanks for reading!

This is some kind interesting topic, and you have nicely correlated the human behaviour on social platforms and the increase of popularity through engagement. Thanks for data and this post.

Stay Blessed.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome. 🙂

interesting. it is wonderful.

hello friend, sometimes it's a bit difficult to get followers, this great topic is very interesting ... thanks for the explanation. Greetings friend

Personally I see that it is not so much the notorious when you have many followers but few publications or likewise if you have many publications but few followers as there are many people who can have a spectacular content but there are people who do not help. I have noticed that there are people in this community who have little mind, they only think about them and not about winning, maximizing their profits, they do not have the minds of investors. So I say that you can have a post with excellent content but if you are surrounded by people who do not help you, you can not generate enough and I say that because my community is like that, Latinos think very little that they do not want to help each other and this is all about, that's how we can win in a good way.

Greetings from Venezuela a hug for you

Siempre he dicho que la mejor forma de conseguir seguidores es esforzándose y teniendo buena información que aportar..

I'm stopping by my Friend and I'm very happy that I did! I found this extremely interesting and extremely helpful. I need to start posting more content. I really do enjoy engaging with the GREAT Steemit Community by replying to all these out of this world posts! Especially like my Friend, @trogdor posts! Please, keep these out of this world posts coming! I love reading and they all are truly fascinating! So fascinating that I am going to start to resteem your posts! I'm always upvoting! Starting with this one! To show my appreciation! All the best! Positive Energy! Great Karma! Your Friend @extraterrestrial :)

All the data 'bout Steem looking good!

I would really like to see how many active/inactive accounts. For example, how many accounts were active in the past 7 days, 30 days, etc... I believe there are about 700,000 accounts on the Steem blockchain. I really wonder how many of those accounts are active. And if there is some way to separate these active accounts into three buckets "human", "good bot" and "spam bot". I think this would be really interesting to see. Great posts!

Is this data about proper posts or the posts metric that we see on our steemit profile pages that includes comments? If it's the latter, that's not surprising at all. If it's the former, it might indeed be a bit surprising though the correlation is not super strong.

Have you checked if account age would have a better or worse correlation with followers?

I am approaching to 10 thousand posts and one thousand followers

i did't understand what the graphic mean :|

This is good info for sure. I think everyone's goal is to get as many followers as we can. Thank you for researching this for us. I do believe your method works. Because you have to work your followers, and get to know them and the more you comment on their post the more they look at your post... This make total sense really. Thanks for sharing!

help me out with steem please

Terima kasih. ini informasi dan dapat dijadikan pelajaran yang bagus demi kemajuan anggota steem. sukses selalu untukmu kawan.

This is really insightful. I was always looking to get started in steemstats analysis. I was confused about the usage of apis etc. I think this post will be a beginning tutorial for me.

This makes total sense. What a great article you have done here!

thank you very much for the information
I am also a beginner, I also do not know about steemit, and your information is very useful, and I will do what you are talking about
Once again, thank you so much @trogdor

thank you very much for the information
I am also a beginner, I also do not know about steemit, and your information is very useful, and I will do what you are talking about
Once again, thank you so much @trogdor

Hey brother @trogdor I found this exceptionally interesting as I am one of the top 'achievers' once a week in terms of comments when I run my contest and I never knew this existed until @arcange made me aware of this when we hit top 3 then 2 then 1 the last month odd.. You have now further cleared up how it is all done. My tourney last week achieved top comments for the day and I was notified by @arcange of this fact. Here was the contest and result https://steemit.com/contest/@craigcryptoking/take-one-for-the-team-and-tag-a-mate-contest-10-sbd-giveaway-round-8 I wish I was a programmer though to understand the 'intricacy's' of it all and I never quiet understood what was so good about achieving massive comment volumes other than a greatly increase follower volume, but it is kind of cool all the same I won't lie, and gladly and gratefully we are achieving both.. Cheer$;)