Apologies in advance to any readers who get instantly annoyed by the idea of percentages or statistics being used to draw conclusions about communicative philosophy.
I've been ever so slightly fascinated with "following" versus "followed by" tallies for individual tweeters on Twitter. Excusing for a moment the inevitable impact of spammer sorts who follow purely to chase followers of their own, it's interesting to consider people's tweets against the backdrop of a comparison of their following/follower tallies. Let's take a look at yours truly, and one of my favourite Twitter friends Marisa Constantinides.
Now I think what a lot of people on Twitter do is look instantly at the followers count, and figure that the higher that count is, the more worth following they are. Based on that simple criteria, my count (at this stage) of 590 might make me look more "popular" or "follow-worthy" than Marisa's count of 313. I think some people also figure that people with larger discrepancies between "following" versus "followers" tallies is some kind of indication of status within the Twitterverse - if there are a lot more people following you than you yourself follow, your place in the Twitter pantheon of Twits is respectably high-up.
But is that why you are on Twitter? To find out who most others follow so you can be a worthy follower, too?
Take a closer look at the tone and nature of the tweets from people with the aforementioned "high-up" status in the Twitterverse. Something I've noticed is that some of these people begin to tweet as if they are sitting on a throne with many loyal followers hanging on their every word. They tweet but don't listen, and rarely if ever actually interact. Other tweeters out there should be seen on a followers tally but not heard, unless they are of a similar lordly twitly rank, and then they can both delight their collective retinues of followers by tweeting to each other and letting everyone listen to them.
Okay, that's exactly why a lot of people use Twitter in the first place, and beyond that, the observation is probably not fair in a lot of ways (the use of "some" was important there!). People who tweet a lot of useful information and observations may gather large numbers of followers and it would be a terrible injustice to start labelling them as arrogant Twitter Gods just because they don't follow as many people as they themselves are followed by. And once the tallies go above 500 or so, I think it becomes potentially a little silly to start reading too much into the tally discrepancies: "Oh that Bob is so up himself - he has 1500 followers but he's only listening to 1200 of them..."
However - humor me for a moment - let's look at Marisa's and my stats according to this analysis of "followers" versus "following"...
If we divide the number of people we follow with the number of people who follow us, and convert it into a percentage, we get an interesting little stat.
Jason -> 482 (following) / 590 (followers) = 82%
Marisa -> 305 (following) / 313 (followers) = 97%
Marisa clearly has a more distinct balance than I do. She "listens" to as many people she speaks to on Twitter (this is just reading the tallies, of course, and does not factor in what is said, when, why and whom to). She also has more "manageable" tallies - well under 500 for both counts. Just looking at the stats there, could we be forgiven for thinking Marisa is more likely to be a person on Twitter we can genuinely connect and interact with?
I guess it depends a lot on why you join Twitter and what you want to do with it. If you're on there to listen to other people, and get instant access to tweets from people you feel you can look up to, then the follower tallies would perhaps be irrelevant to you. However, if you're on there to meet like-minded people, share thoughts and resources and experiences (and generally interact with other people), you might want to consider the follower tallies before you choose whom to follow. If you've chosen to follow someone with a large number of followers but a relatively small number of people they themselves follow, don't be disappointed if they don't want to chat with or get to know you and it seems you're there to listen to them - not vice versa.
And don't for a second allow yourself to be intimidated by your own followers tally compared to others'. Twitter becomes a real pain when it starts to feel like a popularity contest.
:-)
