The follower to following ratio dilemma on Twitter

So now that you’ve gotten set up on Twitter, you’ve probably received a few follower requests from Twitter and followed even more people in the process.

Following other Twitter users is important. This is because when you follow someone you’re essentially saying I want to see what this person talks about because it may be something I want to retweet (or send) to other people that are following me as well.

This is all fine and dandy to follow people because you want to hear what they are saying. This will help you create content or “social media” which you can then send to the people following you. This will keep them engaged and help you gain followers in the process.

So how do I gain followers? Simple!

  • Use Twitter Search to find people to follow that seem interesting
  • Retweet or forward content from Twitter users
  • Post your own tweets – remember to make your tweets public so that they can be found when someone is using Twitter Search

Once you begin gaining followers, it is important to maintain a good Twitter ratio. Basically, a Twitter ratio is having a balanced number of followers to people following you. Why is this important? Once you follow 2,000 people, you cannot follow anyone else until you have 2,000 people following you back. You’ll then get messages saying ‘unable to follow’ and so forth.

Once you reach this point, you’re either going to need to unfollow people (think of it like trading Baseball cards – unfollowing someone in exchange for following someone else that is more likely to follow you back and such). Your other option is to tweet more so that your content gets pushed to other Twitter users to retweet, etc…in-turn, helping you gain followers.

Sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Think of Twitter like a prospects list. You follow quality people who you want to see tweet. In-turn, you retweet their content. People then searching Twitter or Google (Google displays real-time tweets too) see your tweet and follow you as well as the other person who’s content you retweeted typically. You become a trusted source that they can then recommend to their followers.

Based on this, you essentially want to follow most of the people that follow you back – obviously exclude people that seem spammy. You’ll just get a lot of tweets from them and they won’t follow you back.

So the takeaway is this:

Don’t follow many more people than are following you.  Studies show that those with a follower to following ratio less than 1 have more followers.

Best,
Christian