Want More Followers On Twitter? Make Sure You Have A Profile Picture

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Marketing software maker HubSpot has analyzed close to 9 million Twitter profiles based on data collected through its Twitter Grader tool, and has come to the conclusion that accounts with a profile picture average about 10 times more followers than those without.

That on itself is not so surprising; a Twitter profile associated with the default avatar generally screams ‘newbie’, which is generally an incentive not to follow someone unless you know that person in real life or on other social networks. There’s a good reason why spammers who create fake Twitter accounts tend to include pictures in profiles – it’s human nature to instantly trust personalized online accounts more than generic ones.

But we love stats here at TechCrunch, so here you go:

(Via Mike Volpe, who has a pretty good profile picture)

Company: HubSpot
Website: hubspot.com
Launch Date: June 9, 2006
Funding: $101M

HubSpot is on a mission to replace the world’s annoying, interruptive marketing with marketing that people love. HubSpot software is the most powerful, tightly integrated and comprehensive marketing software available, putting personalized inbound marketing into the hands of any business. Over 8,000 companies in 56 countries use our software to create lovable inbound marketing to attract, nurture and convert leads into an accelerating stream of new customers and revenue. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular website...

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Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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