The Twitter Ratio: To Follow or Not to Follow. That is (Part of) the Question

I posted a while back about the Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore/fill-in-the-name-of-about-a-100-different celebrities phenomenon and what it meant for the future of Twitter. Over the last month or so Twitter has gotten even bigger, more heavily used, and has risen even higher on the cultural radar to the point that Kutcher in his competition with CNN to get to a million followers made headline news. Which begs the question:

Why does one need a million Twitter followers?

Well, if one is a celebrity, I suppose it would not be a bad way of marketing oneself. And that’s fine, I suppose. If a person’s goal is to get a bunch of followers in the interest of forwarding their popularity, and if a bunch of followers are satisfied (as they seem to be, in their millions) with this one-to-many relationship in which their chances of getting a tweet responded to by said celebrity are about as great as getting struck by lightning, that’s fine. My first reaction to this is “But this is not what Twitter was intended for.” It’s a social networking app. It supposed to be this place where you and your group of friends, confidants, coworkers, etc. join to follow one another and post little quickie updates on how each other is doing. Because of the homogenous nature of the application, a tweet from Ashton Kutcher about what he had for lunch looks just like a tweet from Aunt Sarah on the same subject. It doesn’t say “And, oh by the way, 1.97 million other close intimates of Ashton just got this same post”. So your response “Was it good?” to Aunt Sarah will probably get a response. Chances of a response to your question to Ashton are about that of hitting the next Powerball. But should we criticize Ashton Kutcher for simply drawing millions of followers? Depends.

Let’s say I’m an up and coming actor, breaking into Hollywood. I set up a Twitter account and immediately start Tweeting to anyone I can find trying to get them to follow me. Ok, no problem there, either. But there is a certain form of etiquette in Twitter, at least in how it was initially envisioned. You are expected to respond. “Follow back” as it is called. If you follow me, I notice you are following me, and decline to follow you, well, I’m certainly free to do that. Perhaps I don’t know you, or like you. But what if 10 thousand or so people respond to my overtures to follow me, I in turn respond by following 5 people (there are actually worse examples of this), and, to make matters worse, when my followers tweet me, I don’t respond to them. To me, this is beginning to look more like fan mail than a social network. Penn Jillette has 625,000 followers and follows 2 people. That can't even be all the people in his house with a Twitter account. This pretty much sends the message "You must hang on my every word, but I couldn't care less what you have to say."

Now, of course, a celebrity with 40,000 followers can’t follow back all 40,000 of them (although some do. You can set up Twitter to “auto-follow” people who follow you. At first, I thought these celebs were Twitter champs until it became apparent that they were actually responding or interacting with any of those they were following). But some of them do yeoman’s work in this regard. Alyssa Milano has about 90k followers. She follows a couple hundred which is a pretty good number of people to follow. And she responds to them.

To me, there are some countervailing factors at work here.

1. How many people follow you AND attempt to communicate with you? Lot’s of people follow folks simply to get the twitter stream updates. Of the people who contact you, how many do you in turn respond to?

2. How many people do you follow? Personally, I think this number can’t go much above 200 and still allow you to maintain some kind of communication with your followers.

3. Do you attempt to contact your followers, or simply wait for them to contact you? Simply following them back is deemed courteous, but is it really if there’s no subsequent communication?

4. You may have a 1 to 1 twitter ratio based on 100 followers and 100 followed. You will have the same ratio if you have 100,000 followers and follow 100,000. The amount of interaction between you and your followers is going to be vastly different in the latter case.

5. In my experience, there are two kinds of people with extremely high twitter ratios. First are the celebs who simply put their accounts on Twitter and who through no direct action of theirs garnered thousands of followers. Second, though, are the folks who are out to garner the greatest number of followers they can for whatever reasons. Their intention may not be to interact with followers at all other than to broadcast to them.

6. Whom do you follow? Consider this scenario: I am a celebrity. I have 40,000 followers. I follow 100 people. Not a bad follow number, but they are all other celebrities. Meanwhile, the 40,000 other people who do follow me are not followed in return at all. Celebrity broadcasting system in disguise.

7. Do you respond to people who follow you, even if you don’t follow them? This is even more confusing. I tweet with a person who has a few thousand followers, and even though she doesn’t follow me, she does respond to my tweets. To me, this is just as important, if not more important than whether she follows me or not. You don’t have to follow someone to communicate with them.

8. Spam factor: You may have 1,900 followers and follow 1,900 people. Great Twitterratio, but you may also be a “bot”. No real interaction going on at all.

To me, all ratios aside, optimal use of Twitter would be based on:

1. How many people contact you (either direct, or reply) that you don’t respond to?

2. Why do you want a number of followers so high that you can’t manage their attempts to contact you?

3. If you have an insane number of followers and in turn follow less than 10 people, is this a social networking app to you at all? Or a celebrity broadcasting network?

One of the underlying elements of Twitter that leads to this confusion is that it differs from other social networking apps in that you don’t have to have permission to follow someone. This doesn’t happen in Facebook or MySpace, for example, since a “friend’s request” is necessary to set up a communication. So this is new ground being tilled, and we’ll be discovering more uses (and misuses) of it as we go along.

Later.