Looking at my woefully low follower number on Twitter one night, I began daydreaming about how awesome it would be if I had the same number of followers as Lady GaGa, Barack Obama, or even Engage’s own Jordan Raynor. After contemplating various ways I could increase my following, a different thought popped into my head.
Often on Sundays during the football season I have similar dreams about how cool it would be to be one of those guys with 4.3 speed and a 40 inch vertical, scoring touchdowns and making linebackers eat grass. Unfortunately, I’m slow, old, and look more like Jonah Hill than Adrian Petersen. But I can still live vicariously through those on the more athletic side by drafting them for my Fantasy Football team and letting them earn me money while I sip beer and eat chips on the couch. So the thought occurred to me, why not a Fantasy Twitter League? Sure, I’m not someone famous who can just sit back and watch my follower count skyrocket, nor am I adept at cultivating a mass number of followers through scintillating tweets, but I am pretty good at running a team of those that can.
So how would this work? As in any league, we need rules. Yes, I really am this big of a nerd. In fact, I’ve even started putting these rules together.
First, there must be a “salary cap” for each team with a value being assigned to each Twitter user based on some metric, likely pure number of followers.
Next, we will need to define what metrics of Twitter success we can assign “points” to. In fantasy football, you earn points for your team members scoring touchdowns, gaining yards and making field goals. What’s the equivalent of these actions on Twitter? Here are a few things to get the conversation started:
- X points for every 100 followers
- X points for every retweet of a member of your team
- X points for every mention of a member of your team
- X points for each increased number in Klout score
Finally, there will need to be an active waiver wire. Much like in fantasy football, players get hurt or go cold and you need to replace them. Had Ashton Kutcher on your FTL team and then he disappeared? Wouldn’t it have been nice to pick up NASCAR’s Brad Keselowski on a whim the week he gained 100,000 new followers in two hours?
So what do you think? Want to play? Who would your first draft pick be in the Fantasy Twitter League draft? Do you take Lady GaGa because she has the most followers, even though she might take up more than half of your salary cap? And what about how frequently a user gets retweeted? Sure Chris Brown is in the top 20 as far as followers go, but he’s only tweeted 61 times, meaning he can’t possibly have a high enough number of retweets to move the ball down the field (so to speak) for your team.
These rules are just the beginning of what could make for a compelling game. Got rules/points you would like to see? Want to work with us to build the FTL app? Let us know in the comment section below.
Maybe I’ve just been missing football too much, but I think the Twitter Fantasy League could be a big hit. I’m already scouting for my team. One guy I won’t be drafting is me. I’d rather just watch the professionals do it.
