“Is this something that stands: if a person is following more people than people are following him/her it’s probably a bad indicator.”

Yes – that’s a great indicator, although it’s more of a ratio thing to be considered as only one data point among many when assessing a Twitter user.

Great discussion!

John

However, I still have this gut feeling there is something about it. With all these hit lists, if you’re really on to it, you can force yourself in there by just starting to follow lot’s of people and without offering too many value. In a country as Belgium (which is rather small) it even isn’t difficult I guess. Not sure what would be the way to take this into account evaluating value (which is indeed something else than having lot’s of followers).

What about this observation: apart from the amount of people following, I hardly see any great twitterati following more people than people are following him/her. Is this something that stands: if a person is following more people than people are following him/her it’s probably a bad indicator.

I see an exception when someone is new to twitter, and finding the way .. but in this case, I guess, you can’t yet speak of a certain status anyway.
And of course there are other exception, like yourself john .. As I see your twitter I consider it valuable, but actually I hardly see it elsewhere.

@tferriss has a very small ratio (157/ 21,655) and @ChrisBrogan follows almost as many people that follow him.

So who’s the better person to follow?

Tim Ferris doesn’t engage his followers that much, whereas Chris provides a lot of value to many folks Twitter.

One thing I look at is the number of @’s or the “conversation quotient” on Twitter-Friends. Read more here: http://www.twitip.com/measuring-your-twitter-networks-health/

In the end, I guess it depends upon your goals for using Twitter.

John

For me this feels natural. If someone starts to follow me, and I see he’s following 1000ths of other people, I loose interest quite often. I know I’m generalizing, but I feel a lot of these people are just doing it for the numbers. Not too interested in what you have to say.

If we look at Veerle for example. Her numbers are amazing. But would you consider them as impressive if she was following 7000 people herself.
Influence tells us something about people wanting to follow you, to hear what you say, no matter if you follow them back.

But the followers number itself is saying something of course. So my formula isn’t right anyway. Would mean that if Veerle was following 7k peeps, she would have no influence whatsoever .. that’s wrong obviously.

Perhaps this is more close: followers + (followers-following). This keeps the influence of the high number of followers, and as well as the discrepancy.
On the above list this would mean this top 10:

1 Veerle Pieters (vpieters)
2 Robin Wauters (robinwauters)
3 Bart (netlash)
4 Technology Geek (TechnologyGeek)
5 Paddy Donnelly (paddydonnelly)
6 Stefan Fields (cashtrix)
7 Serge Jespers (sjespers)
8 Kris Hoet (crossthebreeze)
9 dirkdupon (dirkdupon)
10 Clo Willaerts (bnox)

And Bart: I get you want to follow people back, it’s polite and everything. And tweetdeck is great for this. But don’t you think it’s bogus as well. Aren’t you telling these people: I’m following you, but yet I’m not?
Just a question, no judgment whatsoever! Just want to understand and optimize.

Cheers!

I follow at least 500 people who are no longer active on Twitter, but it’s more of a hassle to find those and remove them since they don’t bother me anyway.

Since I started working with Tweetdeck, I’m following everyone that follows me. This does not mean that I read every tweet of all of them – I’m selecting a few relevant people for me, and put them into a ‘must read’ selection in Tweetdeck. All others I just read incidently. Of course, I’m reading intently every @netlash tweet.

This means that the ‘following’ number that is published on my public profile (662) is no way the number I actually follow (which is more like a 250 some).