Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5598112-20160825030830/@comment-29314741-20160904025338

Erik10101 wrote: Yep, followers give a good idea of which acts are popular online, but there's always so much more to consider.

The audience that doesn't follow people on Twitter. The older audience who don't use a lot of technology and thus vote by phone. The percentage of the performer's audience that actually votes. The audience that came directly from AGT versus the pre-AGT audience. How loyal those fans are.

It's also important to note that there is usually a relationship between how talented an act actually is with their followers. For the most part, the more talented people will get more followers. But acts like danger acts or acrobats never pull in as much followers as singers or comedians since it's harder to share jokes and/or songs online. Yet sometimes those danger/acrobat acts pull in more votes.

For example, Kadan has more Twitter followers than Tape Face, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that Tape Face's fans are MUCH more vocal. I've noticed that, in general, dance acts don't have as many followers as other types of acts unless they do something unique and they generally don't seem to do as well as other types of acts on AGT. I personally haven't followed the show since the beginning, so I don't know if a dancer or dance group has ever won, or how many have even made it into the Top Ten since the show began, but I doubt there are many.

Also, groups from outside the USA, as well as some of the older performers, don't always have Twitter accounts. Some of the acts this year only opened Twitter accounts after they made it into the Judge Cuts, or even later than that, so they had fewer followers. More people seem to visit Facebook over Twitter.

For acts coming from outside the US, a lot of the fans/followers are from the home countries for those acts - and they can't vote. And there are a lot of other followers from outside the US as well who also can't vote.

Finally, time difference may be a factor as well. By the time the show ends in the east, it's 10:00. It could be that people just don''t bother to vote because it's time for bed. I've seen quite a few complaints about the time diffferential from people in the west when it comes to the Dunkin' Save.