Poker Twitter Top Trumps

I celebrated a milestone yesterday, which was pretty important to me, largely because it’s amazing how much of a social media geek I have become in recent years.  I passed the 1000 twitter followers mark yesterday (And also managed to increase my ‘Klout’ by 2 places to 59, whatever that means). I am not sure quite why it is that was so important to me about getting there, other than perhaps most of the people I admire in twitter terms are into quadruple digits.

I have purposely avoided trying to get autofollows from spam accounts. The thing I love about twitter is that it is a listening tool, and certainly not a spamming tool. I like to think that anyone who follows you actually wants to see what you have to say. It is much better to have 20 people who like what you tweet, than have 20,000 people who have followed you for the sake of it.

I also see it as the future of journalism. I am going to the Full Tilt Hearing next week and I am hoping to tweet some updates live as they happen. People want to consume their media much faster these days, and twitter is often the anchor for this new form of consumption (A prime example being yesterday, as millions of us watched a live stream of someone trying to custard pie Rupert Murdoch, speaking of which, that guy got an extra 10,000 twitter followers or something immediately after).

I tried also little stunt to get me over the line; basically anyone who followed or retweeted me that day got put in a draw to win a copy of The Mental Game of Poker. Yes, it was a bit bribey, but I figured that it was at least only going to be poker players who will have participated, and thus exactly the sort of folks I want following me.

I have been playing a little game in my head lately called ‘Twitter Trumps’, where basically I have been trying to assess the relative value of a retweet from a well-known poker player. Thus far @tony_guoga got me around new followers when he retweeted something I posted, @senseichanning got me about 9 new followers, but the big dog of poker social media, @KevMath, on average has got me about 19 new followers every time he has retweeted something I tweeted. (This is all pretty anecdotal evidence btw, please don’t take as gospel).

Makes me wonder who would get me more followers from a retweet - Daniel Negreanu or Hellmuth. I would say Phil, and I reckon the over/under would be 50 followers. 

Of course the best way to get more followers in poker is probably to make the WSOP final table; I’ve just seen Samuel Holden (@SamDMND) get 300 overnight.

I guess 2000 is the next milestone. It seems like some of the guys I consider very influential poker journalists (Dr Pauly, Gary Wise, BJ Nemeth, Kara Scott etc) have about 4000ish, and in my opinion the biggest grassroots social media influencer KevMath has nearly 8000, so I guess if I could come close to 4000 before Twitter becomes the next MySpace, I will be happy enough.  

All I can really do is actually tweet stuff that is worth reading, the next thing of which will be next week when I will be live at the Full Tilt Hearing in London.

Its @barry_carter btw ;)