By Jan Carroza
Twitter lets you follow up to 2000 members until you hit a wall of sorts. Many Twitter users are unaware of this policy until they reach this point. At this point you can only follow 10% more than the number than follow you. When you follow the 2000th person, you’ll get a message about these limits and you won’t be able to follow any more until you get more followers or reduce the number you follow.
The reason for this rule is to prevent abuse. Twitter tries to reduce “churn.” So many are concerned about people who “game” the system to gain as many followers as they can and then dropping followers. We address issues of following policy in a couple of our previous blogs (What’s Your Following Policy?).
Management of the 10% becomes a bit of a nuisance if your general policy is to follow nearly everyone who follows you. That 10% gets chewed up pretty fast when so many services you might use like web clients (BackUpMyTweets, Twibes, Hootsuite) ask that you follow them, but they don’t return the favor. That’s true of many terrific resources such as news and trade publications, as well as celebrities and personalities. I really don’t mind that sources like @Mashable, @Techcrunch, @MarketingSherpa won’t follow me back, but it creates a need for workarounds (see Who Will You Follow?). I’m grateful to have the Twitter list function to let me be able to organize some of these non-followers.
The upshot is that periodically I have to prune those that I follow or spending time organizing them into lists. Either FriendorFollow or Tweepler will help you determine who doesn’t follow you easily so you can decide how to manage those you follow.
This situation creates a yo-yo functionality because you can get stopped repeatedly from following. It’s like have a car that’s running in fits and starts. You’ll think you’ve cleaned it up and then you can’t follow again. I really hate not being able to follow folks back when I want to, especially when they look real interesting. I also hate not being to add new interesting people I have discovered or who have been recommended to me. So I either invest more time in unfollowing folks I may really hate to lose in my stream or adding them to lists which are limited to 20 before I invest more time in more workarounds.
Here’s what Twitter tells you about this policy: “Every account can follow 2,000 users total. Once you’ve followed 2,000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow. This number is different for each account and is based on your ratio of followers to following; this ratio is not published. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter and everyone is subject to follow limits, even high profile and API accounts (read more at: http://support.twitter.com/articles/66885-i-can-t-follow-people-follow-limits).”
Caution: “Please note, however, that regularly following and unfollowing lots of accounts is a violation of the Twitter Rules and can result in account suspension.”
In general, it’s a good idea to always keep your following ratio 10% or less of those that you follow. If you’ve done a lot of exploring to reach 2000 that you follow, but your content and engagement have only gotten you a few hundred followers, you are going to have to do a lot of unfollowing and/or waiting until you get many more followers. Planning ahead should prevent the inconvenience and the grief.
