Okay so, here’s your twitter lesson of the day at my expense. I am affiliated with a few different groups and we follow and support one another on our Blogs, Twitter, Facebook Etc. Lately I’ve been following a lot of twitter accounts with the understanding that the follow would be returned especially in my Moms on Twitter Group. I have gotten a few return follows but, not as many as I’ve been following.
As of today I was following 2,001 Twitter Accounts and had 774 Followers. 1,086 of these are accounts are people in a Twitter Group that I’m affiliated with. I’m on twitter daily and I get an email every time I get a new follower. I usually return the follow or maybe someone returned my follow. Well today I was unable to follow anymore twitter accounts because I had reached my limit. I never knew I had a limit!
According to Twitter Support:
What are the limits?
We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how aggressively users follow other users. We try to make sure that none of our limits restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most Twitter users.
We monitor all accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). You can read more about these below, but if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine. Please note that the only automated following behavior that Twitter allows is auto-follow-back (following a user after they have followed you). Automated un-following is also not permitted. Please review our Automation Rules & Best Practices for more information on automating your account.
What is aggressive following?
Following users is a way to see their updates in your timeline. If an account seems interesting, feel free to follow it! Many Twitter users receive email notifications when someone follows their account or check out the profiles of new followers to see if they share common interests. If some accounts are aggressively or indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention, it makes Twitter a less-nice place to hang out.
What is aggressive follow churn?
If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, that’s fine! You can just visit the person’s profile page and then un-follow them. Aggressive follow churn is when an account repeatedly follows and un-follows large numbers of users. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio.
These behaviors negatively impact the Twitter experience for other users, are common spam tactics, and may lead to account suspension.
Additional limits if you are following 2000 or more people:
The rules about aggressive following and follow churn still apply. In addition, every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following. When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you. When you reach a daily or total limit and we show you an error message, you’ve hit a technical limit imposed to limit egregious behavior by spam accounts and to prevent strain on the site. These are just the technical limits for your account; in addition, you are prohibited from aggressive following behaviors. These behaviors may result in account suspension, regardless of your account’s technical ratio.
Limits improve site performance by ensuring that when we send a person’s message to all of their followers, the sending of that message is meaningful. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter, and everyone is subject to them, including verified and developer accounts. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.
I guess, I’m an aggressive follower! I had no clue about the follower to following ratio. I do know now! I also got some great information from Tiffany at SITS, she gave me a site to keep track of who I’m following and who’s not following me, who my friends are (we are following each other), and who my my Fans are (I’m not following them) http://www.friendorfollow.com and you shouldn’t be following
more people that are following you.
So with that being said, I have started to unfollow people who haven’t posted in months, I will unfollow people I consider spam and I’ll hope that all the groups I’m affiliated with return my follow so I won’t have to resort to unfollowing those who haven’t returned the follow.
Okay, that’s today’s lesson!
