Social media is a funny thing. What seems like the unifying tool to bring together all people of various social strata can sometimes do just the opposite. High school politics aside, there are some matter-of-fact features of social media cool kids which differentiate them from the rest of the e-crowd.
Twitter is the first social engine with full transparency on how cool you are. On Facebook, you can only see a total count of how many friends you have. Who asked who to be friends is an invisible transaction to third parties. One can speculate how that certain friend crept over the 1000 Facebook friend landmark, but it's always a guessing game as to whether they were mainly the friend adder or addee.
On Twitter, everyone can see how many people you follow and how many follow you.
This makes thing pretty simple. If I follow one person and 100 follow me, I'm cool. If one person follows me and I follow 100, not so cool. The very act of following implies that you are not a leader. Hmmm...
What about when the numbers are higher? If you follow 2000, but 2001 follow you. Well, still cool, but not nearly as cool as the former scenario. We need a "cool quotient" to help determine who exactly is a part of the Twitter in-crowd. Let's call it the Twit-cool score or TC score.
The Official Formula to Determine Who Is Cool On Twitter
(Followers+Listed)/Following = Twit-cool score
Example of Ashton Kutcher's coolness versus Ellen DeGeneres:
Ashton: @aplusk= (4,663,252 + 32,386)/337= 13,934 TC score
Ellen: @theellenshow= (4,386,210 + 34,930)/27309= 162 TC score
See the difference? Some may say Ellen cares more about the fans--- but that's exactly the point. Ashton can't keep up with the consumer demand for him. Ellen tries harder to do so, but in turn sacrifices the time and effort to win the ultimate Queen of Cool title.
The takeaway: you can be cooler than Ashton if you are able to solicit 13,935 followers and only manage to follow one person. Good luck.
A note: Cheating is possible here through 3rd party applications and massive friending and de-friending techniques, but that's just not cool.
Twitter forces you to update often.
It's the equivalent of knowing someone from work and thinking they're pretty great, but then going on a retreat with them for two weeks, spending every waking minute with them and suddenly they're not as spectacular as you previously decided.
The pure frequency of updates needed to keep a large audience is a trial of coolness. You need to be the content and be consistently interesting. If you don't produce quality content say goodbye to retweets and realize a lower follower velocity.
Facebook allows you to get by on good looks alone. A solid profile picture can get any social media mute a few hundred followers right out of the gates. Not exactly a spectacular gauge of coolness.
The Coolest Food Trucks
Crossing the threshold from more following to more followers is a major feat for any Tweeter. When our own twitter account at Roaming Hunger (follow us here @roaminghunger we are working on our cool score ourselves...) crossed the fabled Followers>Following mark, it was a day for celebration. Daily, we see the constant struggle of new street food and food truck vendors trying to cross that golden barrier into the Followers>Following club. It takes time, effort, passion and a quality product (both on and off-line.) But we assure you... once you get your TC score over 1, you'll feel pretty cool.