ara pehlivanian

It always bothers me when I get a Twitter notification telling me that someone is following me only to find that they’re following 17,000 people. It’s always seemed insincere to me. I’ve also noticed that some people have tons of followers who follow very few people themselves. I feel that these numbers speak a lot about the people to whom they belong, which is how I came up with what I call the Twitter ratio.

It’s simple, take someone’s “followers” number and divide it by their “following” number. What you end up with is that persons Twitter ratio. So for example, at the time of this writing I have 120 followers and I’m following 124 people. That gives me a ratio of 0.97. Now take the person who is following 17,000 people but only has say, 2,000 followers, they’d have a ratio of 0.12. On the other hand, someone who is following only 100 people but who himself has 2,500 followers would have a ratio of 25.

The question is how to interpret these numbers. My initial take on this is, if you’ve got a really low ratio then to me you come off as a spammer. A really high ratio makes you a twittersnob. But if your ratio hovers at around the one to three mark, then you aren’t spamming and you aren’t a snob.

Am I interpreting these numbers incorrectly? What’s your take?