Twitter’s Follow Limit: Tips and Warnings

You may find yourself in this predicament like we did when we first joined twitter, You vigorously followed numerous people some of whom followed back and others who did not and before you knew it you reached an unexpected limit and could no longer follow more people back.

Surprise, Surprise by default your follow limit on twitter is 2000 or a ratio of your number of followers, in the past it was once stated as 2000 or 110% of your actual followers which ever was greater, but twitter now indicates the ratio supposedly varies by follower. For us it's been pretty consistently at 110% knock on wood!

Here’s some ways you can manage that which we’ve found useful.

As mentioned, when we initially joined twitter, we followed a monster load of celebrities, entertainment and media organizations (LOL), who for obvious reasons didn’t follow back, which put us in a predicament we still navigate to this day, where we have to follow in waves and where long time followers are often followed back first and new followers at a later time. Over time, hopefully we will be able to balance things out and reciprocate follows more closely to when a new person follows us.

More importantly as long as your followers are happy you provide a value add from their follow of You, they are not necessarily overly concerned you have not returned a mutual follow in most cases.

Now onto some of our own personal Techniques:

1. For Business or similar entities or celebrities that aren’t likely to follow you back anyway, consider adding them to a List. This way you can still track their tweets, although it won’t show up in your regular twitter timeline, it will require discipline to every now and then visit the list you've created under your profile and see what those on the list are tweeting about.
   
   

   NOTE: To access or create Lists in Twitter, click on your Profile name right above the box where you compose tweets from and at the next menu that opens select "Lists"

   1. For example:
      1. One such list we’ve created was Film Festivals, for the most part many of the Film Festivals on our list do not follow us, but as they do follow us we make an effort to reciprocate. We do however, follow some key Film Festivals regardless of reciprocation or not. Having this particular list also helps us track Film Festival happenings without having it being lost in our stream of other organizations we follow and from time to time we advertise the list to our followers who may be interested in discovering just what Film Festivals are on Twitter.

         One great benefit of lists is they can provide your followers a way to track the same thing or a convenient way for them to pick and choose people or organizations to follow from your list, often a value add for those who take advantage of doing so.

      
      
      2. Another such list, which is Private, we’ve created is one of media outlets and studios, this allows us to track what’s happening as reported by media outlets and studios and keeps us from unnecessarily pushing up against our follower limit while allowing us to more freely follow people who will reciprocate our follow.
   
   
   2. Lists can be either Public or Private, however you can have only 20 lists.
      
      
      1. VERY IMPORTANT When creating your Lists, be sure you check whether the list will be Public or Private first! Anyone added to a public list will be notified that you’ve added them. If you intend to make the list Private not checking it first could have folks giving you the evil eye once you change it from Public to Private LOL.
      
      
   3. Lists also allow you to better categorize the people you are following under similar related conversations.
   
   
2. It may be time consuming, but peruse who you are following and see who is following you back (i.e. go to your following list, click on the person’s profile to bring it up and you’ll see an indication “Follows You” if that is the case), you may be surprised to know a very large number may not be.
   
   
   1. One way to improve follow back is when following someone consider sending a tweet saying “now following @username please follow back” or something of that nature. You can judge whether they are likely to do this by seeing if the person you’re requesting a follow back has a ratio of followers to following of 1:1 or pretty close to 1:1. For example:
      
      
      1. a person following 5 people with 100 followers, may not be likely to follow you back even with a request, which may be ok, in that case consider adding them to a list instead.
         
         
      2. a person following 90 people with 100 followers may be more inclined to respond to your request and follow back.
         
         
      3. For those who chose not to reciprocate a follow, Ask yourself the important question if this person isn’t following me back, but I follow them am I mutually benefiting from this non-reciprocal follow back? Then act accordingly. It is social media after all, you’re trying to build two way engagement with people.
         
         
3. You can also use some of the web based tools that show you who isn't following you back, as well as show you any inactive accounts you may be following which might be worth consideration for un-following. As an example, an account inactive for over 6 months or a year may be a good candidate to unfollow or you could simply add them to a private list of inactive accounts and from time to time see if they return to active use on twitter and if not then consider unfollowing.
   
   
   1. Some tools to help with this are: http://www.justunfollow.com/ and http://who.unfollowed.me/
      
      
      1. These tools also help you see who you yourself may not be reciprocating a follow to.
      2. A word of caution when signing up for the tools, be sure to play close attention to the check mark boxes asking if you’d like to tweet your activity to your followers when using them, based on your personal preferences check or uncheck accordingly
   2. Personally we use another tool no longer on the market for free at least, called Socialbro (it’s officially a paid service now).
      
      
4. Twitter frowns on mass following and un-following so when you do this during any particular day, whether directly from twitter or the suggested tools, do it in small bursts,
   
   
   1. i.e. manage 50 or so unfollows/follows and then on another day pick up and do the same until you get your following and following ratio to such a level where you can selective follow new people.
      
      
5. Twitter also has a less known limit on how much you can tweet and included in this is the number of profiles you can view in any particular 24 hour period. So, say if you have 500 followers and are also tweeting during the day, too much follow management that involves checking profiles to see who follows you while also tweeting can cause you to enter into what’s called “twitter jail” where for an extended period you can’t do anything on twitter, generally until the next 24 hour period.

   This latter applies regardless whether you’re doing the management directly in twitter or using a tool outside of twitter like the aforementioned.

These are just some general guidelines and observations based on our own experience, please reference twitter's help guide for full details about all their guidelines and subsequent changes which may date this information.