Great post from Allan Young with his thoughts on ‘The Twitter Influence Ratio’ or how you can decide whether someone is following based on the number of people they follow and the number of people that follow them.
Here’s an excerpt (accordign to this we have a Twitter Influence Ratio of 1.41 – we’re not sure if that makes us worth following or not!:
With the Twitter Influence Ratio, we’re going to try and get a read on someone’s true influence level. It stands to reason that if you are interesting, have neat thoughts, and add value to the network, people will naturally gravitate to you and “follow you.” Some of the most influential members of Twitter have many more followers than people they follow. So the Twitter Influence Ratio will attempt to express this relationship as;
Followers / Following = Twitter Influence Ratio
Example: 533 / 609 = 0.875
In the above example, one such self-branded “social app guru” has 533 followers and is following 609 others. This gives him a Twitter Influence Ratio of only 0.875 which means this person is not very influential. Intuitively, you ought to have more followers interested in what you have to say than the number of people you’re following. One might say that 533 followers is nothing to sneeze at. I agree, but the fact that this person has so many followers and is following so many more makes it highly probable that he is what is known as a “friend whore” or “follow whore.” Like the desperate high schooler, he’s just trading votes. Someone with a TI Ratio of less than 1 but is only following 30 others is probably not out there actively trading votes or follows. If I were looking for a consultant, I would run away from this guy and find someone more influential.
UPDATE: Thanks to Twitterratio.com you can get your Twitter ratio without having to work it out yourself 
3 Ways to get your Twitter Ratio
- Use the form below!
- Get your TFF Ratio reported to you directly in Twitter by sending a reply to @tffratio. To send a reply, begin a tweet with @tffratio. The TFF Ratio autoresponder will send a reply back to you with your TFF Ratio and pithy comments within a few seconds (depending on Twitter uptime!). Follow TFF Ratio on Twitter to see everyone’s updates.
- Use one of the Twitter Ratio web services available in the API.
I feel like I’m saying this more and more, but follower counts and ratios really don’t matter, aside from possibly the amount of @ replies someone is posting as a measure of interactivity.
Someone like Barack Obama would have a huge ratio score, but would I get more from him than someone who has just joined and is following more people than are following them? I’d say probably, but it depends entirely on who they are, what they do, and how they do it. None of which comes from a ratio score.
Plus the ratios will be blown out of the water every time Twitter does a cull of banned and suspended accounts from follower totals.
I think my previous attempt at a comment timed out due to dodgy wifi access!
But to repeat my thoughts:
Any type of ratio measure, except possibly the ratio of @ replies to show interactivity, is utterly pointless. Barack Obama would have a great score, but would offer far less interaction and value than someone following more than follow them – depending on who they are, what they do and how they do it. The only way to judge the quality of a person on Twitter is to experience what they have to offer and then decide.
Plus the occasional cull of deleted accounts by Twitter makes it utterly pointless. For instance, last night I would have been fairly influential according to the ratio, but now I wouldn’t – despite the same content, contacts etc, except for some banned accounts I should have screened more carefully.
In fact this actually punishes a close to 1:1 relationship of interaction, because any cull makes an account ‘non-influential’ apparently…
This ratio takes no account of spam followers; you know, the people who follow 1000s to gain a few extra hits on their website or a few extra followers who they can spam their business to. I generally block these people so they no longer show as my follower. My ‘ratio’ is less than 1.0, but had I not blocked these spammers, it would be more than 1.0.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the ratio is only a guide. When I get followed, I first check the ratio. If it’s low (few followers) then I’ll probably block them, but I do look at their posts first to try to assess whether what I have to say would be interesting to that person. If not, then they’re likely to get blocked, and that’s more often than not.
So, I’m <1.0 because I care about the quality of my followers.
http://www.twitter.com/ColinBowen, in case you’re interested.