I seem to be agreeing with Wesley Donehue a lot lately. His latest post “Claire McCaskill’s Twitter Arrogance” addresses an issue I was considering writing about. The optimal Twitter followers/following ratio is a topic that many have weighed in on. Some say that your followers should always be 5% more than those you’re following, some say only follow people you care about, and some say you should only follow people with “influence.” There are dozens of theories on what your ratio should be.

Donehue correctly points out that people who only follow a select group of people come off as “arrogant.” This holds especially true for politicians, such as Sen. McCaskill (D-MO), who is only following one person, despite being followed by 36,691 people. Besides appearing “arrogant,” McCaskill demonstrates that she does not understand the technology.

Twitter is supposed to be a two way conversation, not someone preaching about themselves, Donehue explains, “A politico who is not following people is like that jerk at a party who has to be the center of attention, who only talks about his/her self, and who could give a damn about other people.”

I don’t think that there is one optimal ratio on Twitter. Clearly, candidates don’t want to be following 1,000 people, while only accumulating 15 followers. But the reverse is also bad. I also don’t buy into the theory of only following “influential” tweeps on Twitter. If a candidate’s goal is to spread his/her message and connect with constituents, following a famous politico doesn’t accomplish this. Those people are unlikely to pass along the content and they probably aren’t concerned about your campaign. However, a Twitter user with 500 followers (all of them living within your district) is a lot more likely to retweet your message to fellow voters and get involved in a productive conversation.

To go further, determining a person’s “influence” on Twitter is extremely difficult. There are websites that attempt to this but none of them are perfect. So that means that a person’s influence most likely comes from their name. This comes back to an important point about social media in politics. Any constituent can become an important activist to a campaign regardless of name, age or sex.

So, candidates ought to refollow people who follow them because engaging a lot of local users will end up benefiting your Twitter campaign more than a select few politicians will.

–Chris Walling, Political Editor