Twitter... more than just crappy chatter.

For a long time, I considered Twitter to be nothing more than crappy chatter which was best suited to celebrities keen on telling people when they were, well, taking a crap or some other similar TMI inanity.


A while back, I started some experiments for business and personal reasons to see what happens and why. The experiments gave some results that, to me, were rather remarkable. And of course, they launched a whole new range of experiments that I will tell you about some other time.


The first experiment was "Mr Clean" vs "Mr Asshole".


The "Mr Clean" account was nice, positive and upbeat: engaging all manner of people and talking about nice things, or at least putting a good spin on bad things. It felt nice to be Mr Clean.


The "Mr Asshole" account was downbeat, snarky and pretty much antisocial without being a complete pig: made friends with comedians whose act is mostly foul language, engaged in explicit dialogue with adult actresses, snarky political commentary just to the right of Genghis Khan and worse, while still remaining vaguely politically correct.


At the end of the experiment, the account with the most followers? Mr Asshole. That same account also had the highest count of so-called "influential" Tweeters.


From a marketing perspective, Mr Clean was good quality. From a sheer traffic volume and 'quality' tweeter point of view, Mr Asshole won by a margin of four to one for followers, more than triple the retweets and more.


Want traffic on Twitter? Want interaction? Be an asshole.


While the statistics in this article are 100% accurate, please, don't be an asshole. There are far too many on the internet already, let alone the ones in normal meatspace life.


Technically, Mr Clean's influence on a refined analysis of Klout was better per capita of follower than the other account. Being nice gets less of the 'vital' stats, but ends up with far greater total influence per follower and follow.


You? Make up your own mind, but remember, once you choose to be seen to be an asshole people will treat you like sh*t.