Inside LabourStart

Considering that it’s August, a gain of 266 new followers on Twitter in the last few days is excellent news — it’s a more than 20% increase.  We’ll remind people of this from time to time, and in the fall should see further increases.  If we pick up another 350 followers, we’ll have overtaken even the AFL-CIO, which appears to be the most popular of the union Twitterers (though I haven’t done an exhaustive investigation).

Oh, and we’re no longer in the top 35,000 Twitterers — we’re now in the top 28,000, having jumped over 7,000 others in the last few days.  To make the top 1,000 Twitterers we’d need about 43,000 followers, so that’s not going to happen any time soon.  And to put things in perspective, there are already 99 Twitterers with a million followers or more apiece.

The good news first:  In the last 24 hours, we picked up 220 new followers to our Twitter feed thanks to our mass mailing.  This is a fairly low response (220 out of 58,000), but many of our readers don’t use Twitter, or have already become followers, and it is, after all, August.  Overall our follower base grew by nearly 20% in one day, which is great.

The bad news: The service feeding our new information to Twitter (Twitterfeed) seems to be erratic.  We’ll need to look into why it doesn’t always update in real time.  We may need to consider going manual for a while.