@alexwild brilliant work, thank you for doing this experiment! I'm wondering if you might expect a different result for tweets of your own work rather than someone else's? The reasoning being that your followers are more likely to be the sort of people that might cite your work in future than the followers of a general science communicator. I would for sure argue that for most people the majority of their followers are unlikely to cite, but for your own work you might be reaching the critical audience. One of the reasons I'm on twitter as a follower rather than tweeter is that I see papers from people in my extended community that I wouldn't have seen in the journal that it got published in. It would seem surprising if this effect was totally negligible given that twitter is the source of a substantial fraction of the papers I read. (Although less recently, the quality of twitter really has noticeably declined of late.)