How To Chose Who You Follow On Twitter

Admit or not, we all have our little secret methods of deciding whether to follow someone on Twitter or not. Luckily, the guys over at TechCrunch shed some light on the Golden Ratio theory of following users on Twitter.

The Golden Ratio, or the followers versus following theory is something that most Twitter power users seem to use. When you first join Twitter, you don’t look twice into the details of the person who is following you. But after your followers number increases, things tend to change.

The Twitter timeline tends to get a little polluted with irrelevant tweets after you have more than one or two hundred followers. Not everything in your stream is relevant to you anymore and a filtering system must come into place. That’s where the Golden Ratio theory becomes handy.

Dirty little secrets: deciding who to follow on Twitter might not be the easiest thing to do, but the Golden Ratio method could really help. | Photo: Andy Beez on Flickr

The Golden Ratio method is quite simple: the less people someone follows and the more people are following that person, the user becomes more follow-worthy.

Even though it might not sound as the fairest method to judge whether to follow someone or not, this makes it quite easy to find out which users have the best signal to noise ratio.

So, if the number of followers a user has is greater than the number of people that certain user is following, the TechCrunch guys say that it could be worth clicking through that person’s profile.

But if a person follows significantly more people than the number of users it is followed by, then you should probably think twice before following back.

Do you use the Golden Ratio method to decide which users are worthy of following on Twitter or you have some other mechanism of selecting who you follow back? Sound off in the comments.