Technology in Marketing: Boosting Your Twitter Ratio (What's That?)

There are many Twitter users who seek to maximize the number of “followers” tracking their Tweets. While this may be a useful strategy for boosting one's ego, when it comes to nurturing relationships with the potential to evolve into new business, I'd argue that the quality of one's followers is more important than the quantity. To put it bluntly, just because someone has thousands (or even tens of thousands) of followers doesn't mean he is necessarily more intelligent, wise or witty than someone with only a few hundred followers.

In fact, more often than not, people are able to amass thousands of followers not because they regularly make particularly insightful comments, but because they spend an enormous amount of time clicking the “follow” button for as many people as possible. The hope is that the people they follow will reciprocate and “follow” them back ' thereby boosting the number of their own followers. It's almost like a Ponzi scheme ' click “follow” as much as possible, which increases the number of your own followers, and so on.

Truth is, nobody can follow the tweets of thousands of people a day. You'd need an army of assistants to keep track ' let alone to respond to ' so many tweets each day (assuming this was even a worthwhile endeavor). This only reinforces the point that many people follow other people not because they are interested in what they have to say, but solely because they are seeking reciprocity to boost their own following.

A Case in Point

What really drove home this point recently for me was when I decided to follow a particular individual with an interesting Twitter name, and the person decided to reciprocate and follow me back. But then I noticed something shocking that had earlier escaped me ' this individual had 674 followers, yet had posted exactly zero updates. Yes, that's right ' zero updates ' the person hadn't contributed a single tweet, and still had 674 followers. How? You guessed it ' because the individual was following 1729 people. In other words, all the followers were obtained due to reciprocity. Wow!

Best Metrics

Of course, the reason that building up a large of quantity of followers is so enticing it that it's an easy metric to measure ' just look at an individual's Twitter profile to quickly see the number of his followers. It stands out and looks impressive. But what's the best metric to ascertain the quality of your following?

Services like Klout aim to measure an individual's social media influence across multiple channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But how about a metric that focuses exclusively on Twitter? I'd like to make an argument for the Twitter ratio.

The Twitter Ratio

As explained on www.twitterratio.com, the Twitter ratio is calculated by dividing the number of your followers by the number of your “friends” (i.e., the number of people you follow). So, for example, if 200 people are following you, and you are following 100 people, your Twitter ratio is 200/100, or 2.0.

I think the Twitter ratio (as opposed to the aggregate number of followers) is an excellent method of identifying thought leaders on Twitter ' people worth following. Here's the logic: If you can get a lot of people to follow you without having to first follow them, it proves people are attracted to the intelligence and insight of your tweets and choose to follow you because they want to hear what you have to say on a regular basis. That is, if you can continually attract more followers without a corresponding increase in the number of people you follow, the numerator in your ratio will rise much faster than the denominator. Which suggests that a high Twitter ratio signals high quality tweets worth following.

Indeed, what's great about the Twitter ratio is that it can't be manipulated. In contrast to the number of followers, you can't just raise your Twitter ratio by clicking “follow” on a huge number of people. That will drive down your ratio. Rather, the only way to obtain and maintain a high Twitter ratio is to publish intelligent observations that attract followers. Only by attracting followers with great content can you boost your numerator, and hence your Twitter ratio.