A tip: to make your blog (or social media posts e.g. on Twitter, Facebook) more popular and attractive, to be liked more and get more visitors and friends online, it seems it's quantity not quality that counts.
According to recent research undertaken on Livejournal blogs by associate lecturer Susan Jamison-Powell at Sheffield Hallam University (who I think is @mooglove on Twitter based on basic searching!), the more words contributed, the more attractive the person is considered.
She said "The strongest factor was found to be the total number of words they had contributed over the week. It's not surprising then that we also found that the quantity of material a person had contributed was linked to their network size. Again the people who contributed the most had the most friends in their network."
But the actual tone of the posts (whether negative or positive) had no effect at all!
It seems "the popularity of online participants was to do with their activity within a social media community and not the tone of their posts".
(Seen in a New Scientist news item. And more info is in the Sheffield Hallam press release and BPS release. Also covered in the Telegraph.)
OK, I'm now going to conduct an experiment. I'll be tweeting more (I'm @improbulus on Twitter). In the past I've tended not to tweet unless I felt I had something useful or interesting to say, or was chatting to friends, as I really didn't think anyone would want to know what I've had for breakfast. And I've not cared about how many followers I do (or rather don't!) have, either.
But I'm going to try tweeting more for a few weeks, just to test Jamison-Powell's research. I'd post more here on this ACE Blogger blog, but I actually prefer my blog posts to be useful, and writing even one of my posts takes more time than you might imagine, so we'll see.
Day 0 - I have 274 followers. I ask forgiveness in advance for the inane blatherings I am about to engage in. Follow me & prepare to be bored. But hey, as long as you like me more and think I'm more attractive, that's the point innit? :D
UPDATED - Yes, I gave up on this experiment. No time.. but really my followers didn't increase in the short period I was doing this. Not unexpected perhaps.
