Quick Lessons From @PMarca’s 2014 On Twitter

As someone who uses Twitter a lot (yep, over 70,000 tweets) over the years, it’s been fun to watch Marc Andreessen take Twitter by storm in 2014. In the last year, he’s turned up the volume to build his Twitter network and promote his firm’s investments, curate ideas and articles, and amplify in the voices of others. So, it got me thinking — just how much did @pmarca use Twitter in 2014? The answer to the question is pretty cool (and very consistent with Dan Frommer‘s take from the midway point in 2014, here on Quartz). Note, these aren’t exact statistics for 2014, as he signed up for Twitter many years ago, but given the volume of content creation this year, it’s directionally safe to presume most of his tweets and interactions were generated this year.

As of Dec 25, 2014, @pmarca‘s stats for the year 2014 are (approximate & rounded up for cleanliness):

Number of Tweets: 41,600 (114/day)
Number of Followers: 235,000 (+644/day)
Number of Accounts Followed: 4,700 (+12/day)
Number of Favorites: 121,000 (332/day)
% of Tweets Which Are @Replies: 73.5%  [Source]
Device Share: 78.5% (Twitter web), 19.7% (Twitter for iPhone), 1.7% (Twitter for iPad). [Source]
** Note: His account was created in 2007, and had <1,000 tweets up to 2010, but turned up the volume in Dec ’13. **

Marc was quite consistent throughout the year. If I were trying to build an interest-network online from scratch today, I’d probably follow most of what he’s done plus post/blog and curate links/images/videos on Medium (which has good discovery and juice on Twitter). Heavy use of Twitter, including lots of curation with commentary, lifting the voices of others (including in the media), and timely linking. He’s favorited a tweet well over 100,000 times. All of those people who tweeted got a receipt that Marc has read their tweet. Small, but powerful, and reinforces reciprocity, which is a core tenet of building influence over time. Also critical, as Frommer highlighted, Andreessen balances his broadcast heft by quite consistently replying to people — assuming he tweets 100 times a day, over 70 of those tweets, on average, are replies to others. Despite his tweetstorm megaphone, he actually seems to listen on Twitter. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that, too.