Point Oh!

Kudos to TechCrunch for finally pulling the veil off the one of the biggest myths in social media right now; that you can gauge influence by how many followers someone has on Twitter.  MG Siegler hit the nail on the head when he said that it’s not the number of followers you have as much as it is about the ratio between followers and people you’re following.

Any novice Twitter user can spend an hour or two each day following people, which will result in a lot of them following you back.  This will also attract the spam bots and within a month or two you will have thousands of followers.  Congrats!

The result is a lot of these “social media gurus” who you’ve never heard of popping up in your inbox with 29,999 followers and 32,853 people that they follow.  At first glance, it may look like they’re probably producing decent content since the majority of people that they follow are following them back.  Unfortunately, most people always follow you back or have use a service that auto-follows anyone who follows them.  They want to build their precious follower number too.  Add a healthy percentage of spam accounts to the mix and you have a very misleading stat.

I firmly believe in the golden ratio for Twitter and rarely follow anyone that appears to be on a quest to accumulate followers (with the exception of some members of the Twitterati, like Scoble and Calacanis).  I want the people I follow on Twitter to be about 20% broadcasters (people who post content and don’t engage) and 80% people who I can actually have a conversation with if something they post inspires a response.  The 80% have much more value to me than the 20%.

The one thing I’d add to this is to watch the number of people that your prospective Twitter friend follows.  There are a lot of great tools out there to filter Twitter but you generally won’t get any traction with someone who is following more than 1,000 people unless they have a good reason to flag your tweets.  Are you comfortable with adding someone to your micro network if they aren’t ever listening to you?  If so, go ahead and add them but don’t be under the impression that @nytimes wants your feedback.

As Twitter matures as a platform, it will be interesting to see how they address these kinds of problems.  Being able to easily judge the authenticity of someone who wants to be a part of your micro network of content is a crucial step in transforming Twitter into a mainstream social utility and one that I hope they address soon.  Well, right after taking care of those spam accounts.