Celebrities and Twitter Ratio

A few days ago, one of my friends sent a tweet wondering why celebrities only follow other celebrities on Twitter. Other than a few thoughts about respecting the privacy of their less famous (regular?) friends, I have no idea. However, ever since then, I have been thinking about how Twitter could be used as a way of judging how much of a celebrity someone is. This would be based on the ratio of the number of people following them to the number of people they follow. Here are some examples:

As I write this, I have 21 followers on Twitter, and I am currently following 45 people, so my Twitter Ratio would be 21/45, which is about .47, so I would not be considered a celebrity.

Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on the American version of The Office has 442,732 followers and only follows 85 people, so his Twitter Ratio is 442,732/85 which is 5208.6118, considerably larger than mine.

I would think that anyone who has a Twitter Ratio greater than one could be considered a celebrity. I have not figured out too many people's Twitter Ratios yet, but I think that a scale could be devised that determines how much of a celebrity someone is based on this number. There would have to be some rules in place so that people could not inflate their Ratio. For instance, Brent Spiner, who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation only follows four people, so his ratio is 57880.5, and I doubt anyone would argue that he is ten times the celebrity that Rainn Wilson is.

The ratio would also not apply very well to the many non-persons who tweet, such as TheOnion and SciFri, as these generally follow anyone who follows them, and would have ratios very close to or equal to one. There are also many celebrities on Twitter who pretty clearly aren't actually doing their own tweets, and their Ratios would be less meaningful as well.

I don't know if this idea has already been put out there by anyone before, but I think it is kind of fun. Kind of like figuring out how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon someone is.

In fact, now that I have written all of this, it occurs to me that the number of followers you have tells how big of a celebrity you are, all by itself. What the Twitter Ratio instead measures is how down to earth a celebrity is. It tells how many followers someone has for every one person they follow. Rainn Wilson is more down to earth than Brent Spiner, because he has a lower Twitter Ratio. I suppose that is also apparent when one reads what they tweet about...