One of the most effective ways of growing your Twitter followers list is to follow other people. I myself follow most people who follow me as long as they are not bots, have nothing in common with me or do nothing but post links to their own sites. Other than that, I am happy to follow most people, and I’m sure many other Twitter users do the same.

A few days ago I noticed my followers count drop a little. I wasn’t too sure why but I checked FriendOrFollow and saw that many of the people who were not following me in return had only recently started following me. One name which I noticed was @ShoeMoney, a blogger in a similar niche as me who added me and then unfollowed me a week or so later.

Turns out that many people use this tactic i.e. they follow lots of people, wait a week or so and then secretly unfollow them. I signed up to Qwitter a long time ago, a service which lets you know when someone unfollows you, however recently it hasn’t been sending updates when someone unfollows so I didn’t notice this happening at first.

Getting unfollowed in this manner doesn’t really bother me as I regularly unfollow those who do this however it got me thinking about why people do this, why are they so obcessed with getting their follower count high but keeping their follow count low?

Is Twitter a One Way Street?

I read a few comments about this on some online forums and the general concensus is that some people are doing this to try and give the impression that they are an authority. The idea is that when the average user sees someone who is not following many people but has lots of followers then they must have something important to say. But is that the case?

When you see a user who has lots of followers but isn’t following many people themselves, do you follow them because they must have something important to say? Personally, I do the opposite. I don’t mind someone who doesn’t follow every single person back as there are a lot of people I don’t follow in return.

However, when I see someone with thousands of followers only following a hundred or so back, I see someone who isn’t worth following. I see someone who doesn’t care what anyone else has to say. Now I understand that the more people you follow, the more your Twitter home page becomes full of tweets and it makes following the people you want to follow harder (Clearly Twitter need to follow Tweetdecks example and add a group function on Twitter!) but surely Twitter isn’t just a one way street? Surely a big part of Twitter is interacting with new people?

Celebrities are notorious for not following many people back. Take Ashton Kutcher for example, he currently has over 1.35 million followers but follows less than one hundred people himself, nearly all of which are celebrities. Perhaps that’s why people are trying to keep their follow number down, perhaps a low follow count does demonstrate influence within the Twitter community and shows that you are too busy to follow anyone else.

Again, I’m perhaps being a little harsh with my view because as I stated, the more people you follow, the more updates you get and some people don’t want to clutter their Twitter home page up. What do you think, does Twitter become harder to manage when you add more followers?

The Flip Side

Up until now I have talked about Twitter users with low follow/follower ratios and whether it influences your decision to follow them. But there is a different group of people out there : Twitter users who follow more people than follows them back.

If a low follow/follower ratio implies that the user has something important to say then perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps it shows that the person is not worth following.

I must admit that when I see a person following 800 people but only has 100 followers themselves, I rarely follow them because I get the impression that nearly all of those who followed only did so because they were returning the favour. Is it wrong to think like this?

A few days ago Twitter introduced a few new restrictions on how many people users can follow on Twitter. I am pleased that these new rules have been introduced because it will make it harder for people to grow their list to silly levels using bots and spam tactics (but it won’t stop them!).

• First of all they have introduced a maximum following limit of 2,000 people or 110% of the number of followers you have. So someone who has 500 followers can follow 2,000 people but someone with 3,000 followers can follow a maximum of 3,300 people.
• Secondly, they have introduced a maximum daily follow limit of 1,000 people. So if someone like Ashton Kutcher does feel like following back some of the people that follows him, he will have to do it at a rate of 1,000 people per day.

With these new rules in place there will be less users with high follow/follower ratios though with a limit of 2,000 follows there will still be a lot of Twitter users out there who follow more people than follows them back.

What do you think : Do you actively follow Twitter users who follow more people than follows them back?

Overview

There are many factors which quickly influence my decision on whether I should follow someone or not but the follow to follow ratio is something I always pay attention to. I also look at the number of followers in total the user has, their background image, their avatar and their bio.

Does the follow to follower ratio influence your decision on following someone on Twitter?