Twitter Follower or Twitter Leader?

We’ve all heard the saying “You may know a man by the company he keeps”. Not only is the same true on Twitter, but ignore it at your peril. 

Generally (as in life there are exceptions to the rule), if you have more followers than you are following you look like a leader, someone who is popular, someone who has something useful to say, therefore you look like someone who others should follow.  People with positive follower to following ratios generally tweet useful insightful relevant snippets regularly. They don’t just talk about themselves and they don’t try to sell something to you all the time. They are the one’s everyone ...

...wants to have at the party and be their friends. Follow this pattern and watch your followers grow.

If on the other hand, you are following more people than are following you (which is the norm when you are getting started or you are directly targeting a specific audience.), you will be communicating that you are a follower, not a leader. If you add not be tweeting regularly, not even re-tweeting others tweets, this is basically the same as going to a party and ignoring everyone there.  You will be a Twitter wall-flower, boring Norman, friend-less Jane, the person in a corner at a party looking at the hot crowd with longing (no-one wants to be that person!).  One by one your circle will reduce (apart from the spammers who follow anything with a pulse).

 But not only that, but you may well be consigned to persona non-grata status by automated Tools, until you revise you Twitter ratio, also known as dumping some people. However, this practice is frowned upon by Twitter and you may even end up having your account suspended.  Twitter monitors all accounts for huge numbers of following and un-following per day.  What you might see at Profile Maintenance, Twitter might see as aggressive behaviour.  You can however follow up to 2000 people without too much hassle, but then Twitter will enforce the ratio of follower-following.  Basically, you can’t follow 10,000 if only 100 people are following you.  But if you have followed 2000 people and no-one has followed you, what does this say about you?

Following someone on Twitter indicates that you have opted-in to receive updates from that person.  They don’t have to follow you back and you don’t have to follow them back.  That’s the deal.  Try to keep your follower-following ratio roughly the same, unless you want to appear mysterious and unapproachable, out a cut above the hoi polloi.  But if you follow too many people, you won’t be able to keep up with the information and it will become unmanageable. As your ability and your confidence grows with Twitter you could use Lists or Groups to organise your profile, and then you can add more followers.

So setting your Twitter strategy at the outset, deciding what you are going to use your account for, and deciding who you are going to follow, is essential.  Don’t just follow everyone who follows you.  That’s lame – who does that?

Check out the profiles of people you are thinking of following, read what they tweet about.  Is this the sort of information you will find useful?  Or will it just be too annoying for words?  Do you really want to know about How to make money with 1 click?  No, then don’t follow that person!  Will you life come to an end if you don’t hear about yet another trip to Starbucks or some in joke that is best left at the office?  (What is that about?).  No? If you want Twitter to be useful and informative for your business and you want to provide useful informative information to a grown up audience surround yourself with the right crowd in the first place, decide who you want to associate with, follow them.  Tweet something useful, retweet what your twitter target is tweeting about and add some useful addition and maybe they will notice you? Maybe they will follow you?  Now wouldn’t that be great?