28 April 2019

Final part of Chris Tatham’s account of the club’s Twitter presence ……….
(You can view Part 1 of the series here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here)

So who is interested in following the news and views of our humble little chess club? Well, after a manual trawl and analysis of our 302 followers at the time (there must be a tool for this!) we have some results for you.

Our followers (now 343 and counting…)

Other chess – 8

Some accounts just can’t be reasonably pigeon-holed even where there is a detailed description to explain their purpose!  An example will probably suffice:

The place to report any instances of wrongly set up chess boards and the like!

Random / unknown – 88

It was surprising to find we have so many followers we can’t identify or account for but essentially it includes all the people that:

• don’t put any detail in their twitter biographies;
• don’t reference anything specific to chess;
• use a range of foreign languages that don’t seem to include any internationally known chess words and don’t have a ‘chess related’ image as their profile picture.

A typical example of one or our ‘anonymous’ followers:

???? – indeed, but still everyone is welcome!

Fortunately, we don’t seem to acquire too many obvious spam followers and particularly no-one pushing pawn of a different kind. However that’s not to say we don’t have some ‘odd’ (interesting) followers. For example, one of our few ‘verified’ followers (twitter accounts with a blue tick confirm the authenticity of the account holder – usually a preserve of the well known), happens to be……

…. perhaps an accompaniment for those playing the Fried Liver Attack?

So there we have it, a quick canter through some of the types of followers our humble chess club attracts, and the thing that binds us together is that we all #lovechess (and maybe mayonnaise!).

The other thing is that the social media scene is always moving. For example when this blog post started we had 302 followers and in the few weeks to publication of this 4th instalment we have gained another 41 followers, including another GM and FM. So basically the analysis in this blog post is already out of date, maybe we’ll update it when we get to 500! 🙂