What we found from Magic Eden's Twitter Account
What motivated this analysis was a genuine curiosity to understand the NFT community better. What we found was surprising.
The Solana NFT community has seen a lot of growth recently, and we wanted to take a closer look at this community, and understand who is engaging in this community.
Magic Eden is the leading marketplace for Solana NFTs, capturing well over 95% market share in daily Solana NFT transactions. Anyone who follows Solana NFTs is sure to follow Magic Eden, so this is a great place to start in understanding the Solana NFT community.
In the following analysis, we took a look at the most recent followers of Magic Eden’s official twitter account, @MagicEden — we looked thousands of accounts covering three days worth of followers gained, in the time period between July 26, 2022 to July 29, 2022.
What do followers engage with?
Retweeting is one of the most powerful ways to engage since it shares content to a wider audience. We wanted to know what followers of Magic Eden are retweeting. Which accounts do they retweet the most?
Here’s the leaderboard. (The way to read this chart this is, “36% of followers have retweeted the account @magiceden)
The first thing that stands out is the high presence of promoters.
Here are the most retweeted tweets:
These tweets are all promotional tweets that offer something of monetary value in exchange for engagement. Not surprisingly, they got the most engagement.
Paying for engagement is not necessarily bad - it can be a way to draw people into the community. The next question to ask is, what else are they doing, other than participating in promotions?
Who ONLY participates in promotions?
We want to make a distinction between accounts that do other things, while also engaging in promotional tweets, and accounts that only engage in promotional tweets, or are created for promotional tweets.
To find this, we found all promotional tweets in the past 30 days (promotional tweets = tweets offering incentives for engagement) - which is over 166k tweets — and then we found how often people engaged with them, compared to how much they tweet in general. Then, we find people who only engaged with promotional tweets, or who recently created an account just to engage with promotional tweets. We found that 45% of accounts are dedicated to promotional tweets.
So, what about bots?
Some people may think of bots at this point, and the prevalence of bots on Twitter is also a very topical debate right now. One reason why this is a contentious topic is that it is very challenging to define what is a bot. We don’t think that promotional accounts are equivalent to bots. Many might be operated by real people, who choose to only engage with promotions. However, even so, they are not engaging with the community in a very meaningful way. Shedding light on promotions can inform the motivations behind some accounts, and this can contribute to the discussion in this way.
There is a real community
Here’s the bright side — the remaining 55% of accounts are higher quality. Besides, we only looked at recent followers, so this actually means that Magic Eden gained a bunch of real followers in the past three days. However, it is not great that the so many followers are promotions driven, and this is definitely something that people should be aware of.
We have more questions
While this analysis is on Magic Eden, promotions happen across crypto Twitter, and probably across Twitter as a whole.
Stay tuned, and we will be sharing similar analysis for some other crypto accounts, so that we can get a better understanding of how widespread promotional accounts really are.
We had many more questions after this analysis — maybe you do too. Let us know what you think!