Mega Crypto Influencer BitBoy Sues Atozy: A Deep Dive On The Twitter Engagement Explosion & Fallout
Earlier this week, Twitter influencer atozy announced to his followers he was served a defamation lawsuit from one of the most prominent Crypto influencers, Bitboy_Crypto. This has caused a flurry of activity on both accounts. Let’s break down the numbers.
First, at the time of this writing, the saga is ongoing. You can see the details on each of their Twitter accounts. Our focus is strictly on the numbers that stood out to us.
Followers vs. Engagement: The great decoupling and how it helps the little guy.
Two data points jump right out, the huge discrepancy in followers and the almost identical engagement they’ve received over the last week. A large misconception on Twitter is that the size of your following determines your engagement and reach. While that may have been true in the past or on other platforms, we’ve seen social algorithms prioritize engagement more and more.
This means if you’re posting about relevant topics, you have a good chance of a post going viral whether you have 882k or 40k followers. It’s pretty clear that the Twitter-verse is interested to hear what atozy has to say about this feud.
This is good news for smaller accounts that have dreamed of the days of making it as an online influencer. With Twitter’s focus on real-time engagement per post, your chance of going viral is better than ever. The only secret now is whether you know what your audience wants to hear or not.
Median vs. Average Engagement Numbers: Getting deeper insights from knowing the difference.
Most people are familiar with and understand averages when talking about groups of numbers, but looking at the median gives an even clearer picture. For those who put math and stats behind them after leaving school, here’s a quick recap. Median engagement is the exact middle number of engagements per post, and an average is found by taking all engagement (in that time period) and dividing it by the number of Tweets.
We can see that atozy has a median retweet of 49 vs. BitBoy’s 3. Finding the median gives us a much clearer signal of a normal favorite count is on a per post basis.
Compare that to average favorites, with atozy having 3,888 and BitBoy sitting at 403. The problem with only looking at the average is it might make you think that anytime either account Tweets, they’re getting 3,888 and 403 favorites, respectively.
But this number can be easily skewed to the extreme high if one of those tweets happens to go viral. Taking a quick scroll through atozy’s tweets over the last several weeks, you can see this tweet went viral (and it’s pretty clear why), which gave a big boost to his average.
Why is this distinction important? In practical terms, when you’re looking at an influencer (possibly to hire them for a campaign), the median number will show you what is more likely to happen when they post. When you layer in the average, you can get a better idea of the likelihood of one of their tweets going viral or if they’ve recently tweeted something that went viral.
What’s with the suspicious follower percentage?
This is a fascinating metric that cuts to the heart of another feud raging between Twitter and Elon Musk, the great bot debate. To be clear, this metric is not a measurement of how many bots follow an account. Deciphering the actual number of bots on Twitter is impossible and misses the bigger picture. Some bots are very good and provide great value to the platform.
Instead, what this uncovers is what percentage of an account’s followers are likely, well suspicious, with our focus being more on the activity and engagement of these followers as it relates to the account in question (full details are beyond the scope of this article). This score gives an indication of the quality of an account’s following and the possibility of coordinated engagement.
A lower score is a strong signal that someone has grown their following organically using best practices, like building trust and relationships with their audience.
However, a higher score does not automatically indicate nefarious intent by the account owner. It should be looked at as a sign to proceed with caution and investigate further.
One insight we can pull from this comparison specifically. When you build an audience by sharing ideas they’re interested in and care about and build relationships with those who follow you…
They’re very likely to come to your aid and do whatever they can to help in a time of need. As you can see atozy has made a considerable impact on his audience if someone is willing to donate $100k to assist him with legal fees.
In this specific case, we don’t see evidence to suggest that either account is using any sort of black hat tactics to boost engagement or attempting to game the algorithm. We point this out to highlight and reinforce the power of what a community of raving fans will do for you when you’ve put the time, effort, and work into them.
Closing Thoughts
To be clear, we are not taking either side in this situation and make no claims about the legitimacy of either influencer’s claims in the matter. We will leave that up to each party’s attorneys.
Our aim with this breakdown is to show the incredible insights you can gain when you’re able to see past the noise on social media and focus on the real numbers in real time with an ongoing and evolving situation playing out on social media.
If you enjoyed this post, please let us know your biggest takeaway in the comments or consider a retweet with your own thoughts. If we get enough interest, we can continue doing more of these deep dives to help you create a better social media experience for yourself.
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