Five Criteria Why You Should Follow Someone on Twitter

Becoming a power Twitter user also means you need to choose the people you follow very carefully. Louis Gray states that you don’t actually choose people, but rather ideas and topics that you share with others or you are particularly interested in.

I agree, but it’s just the starting point. Then you need to check who are the people who are likely to give you more and from whom you can get/learn the most.

1) Followers

A person who has many followers is likely to be an interesting person to follow. It is not necessarily true, but the probability is usually very high.

2) Followers/Friends Ratio

The bigger is, the best is. Again, this is not necessarily true, but this parameter should get a fair weight from you during the process of choosing new Twitter friends. There are different cases to take into account:

- much lower than 1: many people try to get followers by following other users. Most of the time they don’t really care of them, but they just want to catch their attention in order to, hopefully, being followed back. Some follow back while others don’t. This process lead to a situation where that user has way more friends than followers.

- close to 1: if the number of followers is very high, this parameter must be taken into account and it should influence your choice positively. In general, I would say this is not much significant though. For example, Robert Scoble and Louis Gray are in this category.

- much higher than 1: in this case, you are likely in front of a power/VIP user VIP. This is ok, but sometimes people like those are not that engaging and often you have to forget to receive responses from them. Example: the popular rapper McHammer.

3) Number of @someone in their timeline

If this number is high and, in particular, the % of replies (compared to the total number of messages) is high, then you are likely in front of a very engaging user, who likes joining conversations and who is willing to reply to you or to involve you in discussions he starts. It’s also worth noting that if the ratio between this number and the number of distinct “someone” tends to 1, then it means this user is involved in conversations with many different users and not always with the same ones.

4) Number of “RT @someone” in their timeline

This number, that is the number of retweets, gives you an idea of how much a certain user is willing to spread the word about something interesting. This is also a good endorsement for users who are retweeted, and since tomorrow you can be one of them, it’s a very effective way to get more followers.

5) Number of “RT @user” in the public timeline

How good is the content provided by the user you are going, probably, to follow? Well, it’s certainly true that if many other users retweet his/her content, the probability that it is a “worth-a-look” content is higher.

As stated at the beginning of this post, the evaluation of a twitter user is just the second step. The first step is to select a group of users who are potentially interesting for certain specific topics you care of. That means you should perform some Twitter searches to extract this group among the noise of Twitter before going through the points above.

In conclusion, if you want to make your Twitter experience effective, interesting and worth the time you spend there, you have to carefully pay attention at the moves you make. Pressing “Follow” is easy, but sometimes it could mean more time spent trying to survive to useless and distracting noise.

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Tagged as: followers, friendfeed, Louis Gray, luca filigheddu, robert scoble, Social network, Twitter