Blogging Tips

Your Twitter ratio is a badge of honor for some, indicating your level of authority as a Twitter user. So maintaining this ratio could be important for you as a user, considering this ratio helps you gain new users, spread your message and help you become more discoverable to others.
There’s a few different reasons why your ratio may be off: you may try gaining followers by following others, or you may have an auto-follow feature through a third party Twitter app, but no automatic un-follow. The auto-follow aspect of your Twitter management are notable because of their automatic capabilities. These are features that you don’t really have to give a second thought, but if you don’t occasionally check on them they could eventually require your attention.

Even with an automatic un-following feature added to your Twitter account, you may still need to check out who you’re auto-following, as a lot of spam accounts can take away from the value of your home page stream and skew your Twitter ratio unnecessarily.

One way to manually go through the Twitter users you follow is to click on the “following” link on your Twitter sidebar. From here you’ll see the username and user photo of those you’re following. Here you’ll also have the option of removing them from your following list, send them a direct message, or nudge them as a mobile reminder for them to update from their phone.

The last two options are only available to those users that are following you back. So if you don’t see the option to send them a direct message or nudge them, then this user isn’t following you in return. Now it’s time to make a judgement call on whether or not you’d like to continue following them. Check out their Twitter stream to see how active they are, and what kind of content they’re pushing through their stream. If their content isn’t adding value to you or your interests, then don’t feel badly about removing them from your following list.

Often times a popular resource on Twitter will not follow many other users in return. For instance many news Twitter streams don’t return-follow, yet they’re still a valuable resource on Twitter. One reason for this level of ratio imbalance is because that resource is on Twitter simply to push content in a more accessible format to others, and not to fully engage in Twitter conversation.

If you have the option to nudge a user, you may want to check out their profile and see if they’ve updated their Twitter stream recent.y. The nudge feature is specidifally for mobile users, so if this particular user is simply using the web or another app to update their Twitter stream, they may still be very active on Twitter and still hav an option for you to nudge them. But if that user relies on their mobile device to update their Twitter stream and they haven’t updated in a while, you may again want to consider removing them from your following list.

Another thing to look out for when manually managing your Twitter following list is the username and user photo. If you see odd usernames that appear to be a series of letters that don’t necessarily spell a word, then it could be a spam account. Combined with a non-existent photo, a user photo that’s used by several different Twitter accounts, or a user photo of a scantily clad person should really set of your alarm, as this is almost certainly an account that’s been created for spam purposes.

It may seem tedious work, but done even once a month can really help keep your Twitter ratio intact. As I mentioned, your Twitter ratio is a vvery quick and easily calculated way of indicating what type of user you are and what kind of authority you pull on the site. So if you can keep your followers higher than the number of users you’re following, then you’ll have an improved ranking for Twitter user recommendation tools, search engines and other Twitter-related discovery tools, all of which help you build your brand on Twitter.