Twitter follower ratios
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote a post defining the unofficial social stratosphere that is based entirely on your follow-to-follower ratio on Twitter. For my own Twitter account I follow a little over 200 people but am followed by more than 1,200. I’m continually unimpressed by users that have 24,000 followers but follow the same number of people; their accounts are virtually useless as anything other than a one-way squawk box and, given their following methods, they likely don’t have a very loyal readership. I find that when my blog is linked to by one of these accounts the traffic is often minimal, most likely because they are followed by the same kind of people — those who automatically do mutual follows. If everyone is following 24,000 people, then everyone is following nobody.
I find it hilarious that anyone would put any stock in social network “follow” numbers, except perhaps for Facebook. The number of porn-spam accounts “following” me on any given day is astoundingly similar to the number sending me add requests on MySpace two years ago, when I backed away from it.