Golden ratio of twitter

When you come to Twitter platform as a novice, you will find that everything is easy-going. You will get alert about a follower – perhaps you would also respond by following the person in return. Of course, you would certainly need some tweets in your stream. After a while, you will start being choosy about who follows you – you will start scrutinizing their profiles and most current tweets. Eventually, you will resort to the secret ratio which everyone is aware of (although they may or may not realize it) to assess who is worth following: ‘Followers vs. ‘Following’.


When someone is following less people and has more people following him or her instead, such person is possibly worth following. On the other hand, when people are following more people and have less people following them, then the reverse is likely to be the case.

Here’s the reason why this would work, so the email alert that pops up when you have a follower, brings this info to the front and center. Following their profile image, here are the contents of these emails;

1. How many people that are following the user
2. The count (number of tweets made)
3. How many people the user is following

In a situation where number 1 is greater than number 3 (which we could term ‘positive ratio’), it may be worthwhile clicking through the individual’s profile. If the difference between number 1 and number 3 is much – invariably, such users are worth looking at (at least). On the other hand, if number 3 is much greater than number 1 (which is termed negative ratio), it is most likely that such users are spamming, or are marketers. A case of close to ‘even ratio’ implies that such persons could be considered – on a case-by-case basis.

However, exceptions to the cases always exist. For instance, going on a user-by-user basis, users would have friends whose ratios are negative – but they don’t mind following them, not bothering about the negative ratio. Nevertheless, going by the large-scale basis, if you are having multiple requests which you need to sort through, the system works in a desirable manner.

Here’s the fact; although majority of the people are aware to an extent that these ratios exist, they prefer not to talk about them – their reason being that it tends to be contrary to the basic modus operandi of social networking; the notion that when you become someone’s follower, whether or not you admit it, you would desire that they follow you in return. Well, thanks to Twitter’s asymmetric social graph, things do not work that way on Twitter platform quite often.

This is hence the reason for Twitter ecosystem that features more negative ratio users when compared to the regular norm in social networking sites. And you know that no one wants to hear that they are not unique and admirable snowflake – so, it is understandable if some people pick offence at this post. Well, that doesn’t change the fact.

The conclusion of the matter is that, it does not make much sense following thousands of people. From experience, it is usually spammers or marketers that indulge in massive following. Let me quickly say that this rule may not apply to new users who are trying to build following – thus the ratio factor may not apply at this stage.