Even if you are a Twitter novice, you may already have noticed that the figures of “following” and “followers” for individual users vary considerably. There is actually quite a lot these figures can tell you about the user.

So what may help you get the basic feeling about the Twitterer are the absolute figures of followers & following as well as f/f ratio.

Based on these numbers, I categorize Twitterers as follows:

Hero – has plenty of followers (over 1000) and usually following just a few (high ratio). Example may be Jeffrey Zeldman with ratio of around 50. These people have so many followers, because they usually share useful stuff.

Celebrity – similarly to Hero, has plenty of followers (over 1000) and usually following just a few (high ratio). The difference is they share just useless junk. Example is Ashton Kutcher:

Rookie – is following several people but does not have many followers so far (ratio below 1). The other signs are (s)he usually has just a few updates, default twitter icon and background and a firts message like “Hello Twitter” or “Please follow me” . Nothing wrong with that, every Twitterer wnet thru this phase. Here is an example:

Stalker – follows thousands of people, hoping they will follow him in return, so that he can feed them with his marketing bulls*t. Example:

Friend – a person who has maybe some 100-200 followers and follows approximately the same number of people. These are the unknown soldiers of Twitter, like me. Example:

Exceptions – there are notable exceptions which do not fall within the above categories, despite the numbers may indicate so. An example would probably be WordPress:

So whom to follow? I guess Heroes, Firends and Exceptions are the right choice. Generally, I am suspicious about anyone following more than 200 people. I think it’s almost impossible to follow more than 200 people, even if you just quickly scan first 3 words of the tweets.

What is your experience? Please share!

And of course: