By now we all know the importance of proper twitter follower management. During the early days of Twitter (last year 
) many people looked to increase their Twitter following by following as many people as possible. I must admit that I did this as well. It made my kind of hate Twitter because I was bombarded with useful crap every half a second.
Well today I took action and and did a little spring cleaning and wiped out hundreds of people that I was following and not really sure why. I now have a very health friend to follower ratio, 65 friends and 842 followers. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to manage my twitter stream and actually read what people are tweeting, there is another very important reason to closely monitor and manage your friend to follower ratio.
In the blogging world advertisers use several sources to judge your site, page rank, Alexa ranking, rss subscribers among others. In the Twitter-verse, advertisers also judge your Twitter account to determine if it is worth spending money advertising through your account. The overall amount of Twitter followers is one determination but most advertisers will look deeper and look at your friend to follower ratio. The thought is that the larger the gap the more authority you have. I bring this up because if you are looking to make money with Sponsored Tweets (affiliate) or MyLikes (affiliate) it is VERY important that you have more followers than you are following. In fact, with MyLikes, if you refer someone through your affiliate link and they are following more people than are following them, they do not even give you credit for it. To them, that is a useless Twitter account. I found this rule out the hard way, I referred over 18 people so far and only got credit and paid for 4 of them. I know this is a small sample size, put over 75% of the people were following more people than were following them.
If you are not looking to make money on Twitter, no biggy, but if you want to monetize your Twitter account you may want to do a little spring cleaning.
If you are looking for more Twitter followers – I personally recommend TweetAdder – click on the banner below to learn more:
If that is the case, I really need to clean and manage my twitter account very well, to get more credit from Mylike. This is a nice tip for anyone who want to monetize his Twitter account
I think Twitter is the most updated when it comes to news and current affairs. Especially worldwide, where news centers tweet the news before airing it. Thanks for sharing this. I have been exploring your blog and found many useful information.
@Travel Tips Newsletter, You purest you. I feel the same way, that is why I have separate Twitter accounts.
Twitter is based on very simple concept ie just followers and following, its simple yet powerful.
Thanks for providing great resource.
I just follow people who interest me, not caring about the ratios yet.
Dan great post.
I have been thinking about dumping a lot of people I am following. I know I normally add a couple hundred a week I think might be worth following, but I forget to remove the ones that I do not need.
As for having authority I do notice that most of the high authority twitter users have a very low following and high following account.
I think its time I start clearing things out.
.-= element321´s last blog ..Guest Post: On-Page SEO Tips =-.
Thanks you for the eads up, although I am neither looking to monetise my twitter account or have enough follower to even dream of starting to unfollow people.
The thing I did do though was block “fake accounts” from following me because I am not that desperate to have followers
.
Good things will come in time to those who can wait.
.-= Tom@Websites for Accountants´s last blog ..6 easy steps to improve your practice visibility on social websites =-.
Hi Dan,
the problem with myLikes payment for referral is they have several rules for it. One is that the referred person must have more than 500 followers another one is that they pay only for persons from specific countries (mainly North America, Europe and Australia and one or two more developed countries
). Their referral program seems great on the first look but like you see now, you need targeted followers to get really the most out of myLikes referral program 
.-= Martin@Cornyman’s Contest & Blog reviews´s last blog ..Easy ways to join Blazingminds Competition! =-.
In the beginning it necessary to have a handful of people you are following to make of twitter of any use. I’m still following anybody that interests me. But now grown a bit and am keeping only the friends from blogging world.
Though I am aware of the importance of followers and following, I’m not going to aggressively unfollow yet. I don’t think I’m going to use my account for business profit right now. Still developing relations and expecting to find some nice and helpful friends as I am.
Your post is really useful, that shows the next step for me. Thanks a lot for the wise words.
.-= Suresh Khanal´s last blog ..Will Twitter ban me for following too many =-.
Hey Dan – Do you know what the daily threshold of unfollows you can do per day before your account gets suspended?
Many people use online tools to mass unfollow and wonder why they’re account gets suspended.
.-= Jack | Online Marketing Blog´s last blog ..The Art of Smart Commenting…For Dummies. =-.
@Jack | Online Marketing Blog, I have heard different numbers from different people. I have heard 999 in one day from some folks. That seems to much for me. I did mine in a couple of steps and was only about half that many. Good point though about the dangers of mass unfollowing