Happened to see Cuba Gooding Jr’s first tweet�about 30 minutes or so after he created it.
Update: @cubagoodingjr is no longer active so not getting tweets from it any longer
At the time his profile said he had 559 followers. A few minutes later I refreshed his profile and saw the follower count had increased to 590 and every few minutes it kept increasing. By the end of the day he had about 4,000 followers.
I thought it would be interesting to track how his follower count changed going forward. So I used the Twitter API to get his follower count once per day, save the data, and then created a web page to visualize his follower count per day.
After 2 days Cuba had about 7,000 followers which averaged out to about 175 new followers per hour. �However, the number of new followers slowed down quickly to 30 or so new followers per day and after about 3 months he only gets about 10 new followers per day.� In fact, some days, he has net loss of followers, eg more people unfollow than him, than new follows on that day.
For the technically inclined, I setup an automatic retrieval of Cuba’s Tweets using Twitter’s API and the Tweepy Python module scheduled to run daily using a cron job.
The follower counts get put into a database. I created a PHP web page application to retrieve the data from the database, and create a web page that includes the Google Charts API to create a simple line chart to show Cuba’s regularly updated follower count by day.
You can get the cron job and PHP web page code from my� Github repository.�
If you want to run this code yourself you will need a Twitter developer account and an OAuth file.