March 28, 2024

Who to Follow on Twitter

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow anybody; but you do have to become very strategic about who to follow on Twitter. Forget that “follow me, I’ll follow you back” concept: this is neophyte garbage that won’t get you any more respect than you yourself have for a spammer. Honestly: what do you think of a person who has 250,000 followers but follows roughly the same number of accounts?

For a good proxy of the total number of accounts you want to follow, see how many accounts the person who aspire to be follows. In most cases, it will be between 100 and 300.

 

Best People to Follow on Twitter

Making the right decisions on who to follow will also help you get more followers to your own account. The best people to follow on Twitter are not necessarily those who have the most followers, and neither it is those who’ll

The fewer account you follow, the more likely your profile’s visitors will check them, which gives you an

 

Take a look at the accounts I follow.

I don’t expect Sharon Stone to follow me back yet, but I don’t care whether she does. I follow Sharon because I have my personal reasons to, just as I have personal reason to follow Elon Musk, Google Analytics, and Lamborghini. Now, the good news about having personal reasons to follow an account is that the number of those accounts will be very limited.

You offer people an opportunity to follow your awesomeness: if you have to pay them with a follow-back, the truth is: they don’t care for you. And, if so: let them go wherever they may, which will be the accounts they follow without expecting the return favor.

Why does Dalai Lama not Follow Anybody on Twitter?

Many journalists have Twitter accounts, and a lot of them

 

 

In his Republic, Plato famously stated:

“… suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.”

Plato, “The Republic”, Book II

Let’s follow his advice and employ this magnifying technique with respect to Twitter. You probably already follow some of its popular users: how many accounts do they follow?

Let’s take a look at accounts with most Twitter followers as determined by the FriendOrFollow website on 3/3/2019:

Accounts with the Most Twitter Followers as of 3/3/2019 by FriendOrFollow
Accounts with the Most Twitter Followers as of 3/3/2019. Source: friendorfollow.com/twitter/most-followers/

Here are the same numbers in a table format, with two additional columns (ratios between (1) the followers and the following accounts, and (2) the followers and tweets) and average for the top-20:

Top-20 Most-Followed Twitter Accounts with Ratios and Averages (3/3/2019)
Top-20 Most-Followed Twitter Accounts with Ratios and Averages (3/3/2019)

This data gives us a lot of useful information, such as:

  • Taylor Swift does not follow anybody and has by far the fewest tweets in the top-20 while still having #5 place overall
    • In fact, her ratios had to be taken out of the conditional formatting to avoid skewing the colors
  • Barack Obama is a sweetheart who follows an insane amount of accounts (which makes me wonder how many of them he is aware of following)
  • Ariana Grande and Donald Trump are extraordinarily apt Twitterers, each tweeting at roughly two thirds of CNN Breaking News’ pace

Humor aside (we all know that essentially all of the Twitter activity of these people is done by their huge PR and marketing teams), despite the variance of the numbers we see some trends useful to building a commanding followers base:

  • Even the lowest ratio of Followers-to-Following in the top-20 (exhibited by Britney Spears) well exceeds 100-to-1 (148), while the average in top-20 is 922 (which is close to 0.1%)