I often get asked how many followers I have on Twitter. I proudly tell who ever is asking the number, but the crucial part I don’t mention and rarely get asked is “how many people do you follow?”
For me the two questions should go hand in hand. I cant see how the number of followers can be discussed without the counter number. The right question to ask me is “what is your follower to following Ratio?” At the moment I have approximately 4250 followers and follow 250. That would make my ratio 17:1. Simply put, I have 17 people following me for every one person I follow.
So, why should that matter? Should I even Care?
Well I care and so should you. Unless you have “fame” from sources other than social media, that number is a reflection of your social media credibility. The more followers you have gives your content or conversation the opportunity to been seen and engaged upon and shared. When I see someone that I may want to follow, I look at the follow ratio of that person. If it looks like 1:1, I assume that this person just follows everyone that follows them back and is not gaining followers by creating quality, interesting or relevant content and conversation starters. There are other factors that would make up my mind, but this is an important one. If you are interesting on social media platforms, you will organically gain followers. Its that simple.
Its easy to join the #TeamFollowBack camp and let people give you the chance to show them what you are capable of, but if you are just spamming their timeline, they will unfriend, unfollow, mute or even worse, rant online about you.
Its perfectly okay not to have thousands of followers, as in life, not everyone online can be a leader. So rather tweet less often, but make the tweets relevant to someone. Interact with the people on the platform and don’t just follow your friends and family cause they are your friends and family, especially if they don’t ever tweet. We all have them.
We can’t all be Justin Bieber (ratio 206 :1) but then again, we don’t really want to be.
