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Following people on Twitter can be a bit of a headache. Follow too many and you can’t see the wood through the trees, follow too few and people may think you’re not very”social”.

So how many people should you follow and what is the right ratio between Following and Followers?

Lots of people use automated services to auto-follow those that follow them. Often these services allow you to un-follow those who stop following you, which makes sense in some ways, but doesn’t that take the point of being social away?

The benefit of using these automation services is the time saving factor, but, there is a huge misconseption that when someone follows you, you are obliged to follow them back. Some claim it’s “best practice”!

This is a misconseption that many people fall for and this can take away one of the fundamental reasons for using Twitter in the first place – to get real time updates about topics that you’re interested in.

How are you supposed to see tweets from people you want to hear from if your timeline is full of “crap”, written by people you “auto-follow”?

Rant over about following the wrong people – lets get down to point of this blog post – The Twitter Ratio and why you MUST get the balance right.

According to http://tffratio.com/ :

Your TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio) is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). The higher the ratio, the more Twitter heat you pack.

• A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return. Check your pulse, you might be a bot.
• A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Many people think that a ratio of around 1.0 is the best – you’re listening and being listened to.
• A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what you have to say. You might be a thought leader in your community.
• A TFF Ratio 10 or higher indicates that you’re either a Rock Star in your field or you are an elitist and you cannot be bothered by Twitter’s mindless chatter. You like to hear yourself talk. Luckily others like to hear you talk, too. You may be an ass.

This makes logical sense and it’s a good way to benchmark where you are and to compare your Twitter account against others. But don’t get too hung up on this ratio structure.

Look at your own online habits and apply the same logic to most other Twitter users. I, for example, don’t auto-follow, but that’s not to say that I don’t follow anyone who follows me. I take a much more objective view when I’m looking at my followers and I take the time to read their bio and sometimes look at their website/blog to see if the content they’re tweeting about is related to my interests. If so, I follow them – if not, I don’t. Simple.

Another thing I look at when deciding who to follow is the number of followers thay have vs the number of people they follow. I don’t necessarily take a scientific approach, or work out the mathematical ratio such as the one above from tffratio.com. But sometimes, when someone follows 3,000 people and only has 25 followers, I have to ask myself if I’d get any value from someone who is clearly following en-mass, in the hope of attracting lot’s of auto-followers. Generally I find that these people are attracting un-targetted or un-related followers, which probably means they’re promoting products and services via broadcast tweeting, rather than entering conersations and adding value to those who do actually follow them.

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