Understanding the Experienced Twitter User’s Vetting Process Can Help You Gain Followers

If you’re new to Twitter and hoping to gain lots of quality followers, a good understanding of how experienced Twitter users go about vetting potential new follows is very important. Of course, there are plenty of twits that auto follow everyone, but that’s why I said “quality” followers.

Based on the results of my recent survey, here are the primary vetting criteria most often used and how I personally use them:

1. Checking the follower/following ratio. For me, this is the first thing I look at when I’m checking the profile of someone I’m considering following. I don’t necessarily care if the ratio is equal or even close because there are plenty of interesting people that everyone follows but who follow very few themselves. @LanceArmstrong is an example of such a Twitter user. It’s when the ratio is lopsided in the opposite direction that it concerns me.

The most telling ratio is one where the following count is markedly higher than the follower count. In most cases this indicates someone that is following lots of twits in an indiscriminate manner just to gain followers. Twitter has imposed an arbitrary limit of 2,000 following unless your follower count is high enough, so when I see a following count pegged at exactly 2,000 and a relatively low follower number, I don’t even bother looking further.

2. Do they have a bio? If they don’t have a bio at all, I almost always skip them. I ask myself why wouldn’t someone take a few minutes during the signup process to write a quick bio to let me know a bit about them and what they’re doing on Twitter? If they have no bio I assume they’re a spammer, hiding something, or just plain lazy, any of which is enough reason for me not to follow them.

3. Generic twavatars. When I see the generic googly-eyed Twitter avatar staring back at me I instantly get a bad feeling about that twit. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt, though, just in case they’re brand new and haven’t gotten around to uploading one yet or possibly don’t know how to add one. In order for me to follow someone with a generic twavatar, they’re going to have to pass the rest of my vetting tests with flying colors.

For any of you that don’t know how to add an avatar photo to your Twitter profile, I wrote an easy-to-follow tutorial which you can find here.

4. What about their tweets? Do they only talk about themselves or do they @reply others? Or conversely, are almost all of their tweets @replies? If they never reply to anyone I’m probably not going to be interested in following them because they don’t engage in conversation and obviously don’t understand the social aspect of Twitter. People who only talk about themselves and never show any interest in anyone else bore me. In the second case — where they only reply to others — why would I want to follow someone who never formulates a thought of their own and simply writes knee jerk reactions to what others say?

Tip: A dead giveaway that someone is a spammer is a profile with a bio that is an obvious attempt to sell you something along with a link to a spammy website, and they’ve hit the 2,000 following cap and have only posted a few tweets, most of which usually contain links.

5. Check out the website they link to in their bio area. I usually don’t get this far, primarily because I get so many followers every day that I just don’t have the time, but if I haven’t made a decision after reviewing the first four criteria I will sometimes take a look at their website. This can be especially helpful if it’s a new Twitter user and they haven’t posted enough tweets to help me to determine if they’re interesting or not.

I’d like to mention that yes, I do often visit the websites of interesting Twitter users, but right now we’re talking about what I do during a quick vet checkup.

6. What about their background? I often form a quick opinion about someone based on their Twitter background. If they’ve taken the time to replace the generic background with one of their own, it shows me that they’re probably serious about this. It doesn’t have to be a professional-looking background and can just be a photo for all I care… the point is that it tells me something about them. Now, in the case of someone that has created a custom background with a bit of text explaining what they do along with the URLs of their other networking accounts or their website/blog, it definitely helps me make a much quicker assessment and often will be all I need to make a decision to follow them.

If you take these vetting criteria into account, I guarantee that you’ll find it makes a big difference in how often someone will follow you. If you don’t have a bio or twavatar, put one up now. If you don’t have many tweets yet, don’t spend time following a bunch of people hoping that they’ll follow you back; spend time posting some tweets for a while. I know it feels like you’re talking to yourself, but it’s no different than starting a new blog and writing for no one for a while. The fact is that no one will ever come back to your blog if there are no posts, just as very few people will follow you if you have no tweets.