Did you know that Twitter limits the number of people you can follow? Neither did I. I did know that it is generally a good idea to keep the number of people you follow not too much larger than the number of people who follow you, but that sounds boring and vague. Your status as a productive member of Twitter-land is a bit fickle, but you can relax now. I’ve figured this out for you.
I recently renewed my interest in my own social media /
content marketing work. (Thus this
blog…) And as part of this new obsession,
I’ve been exploring Twitter. I came
across the first tool that dramatically increased my followers:
1. Add people you
know using Twitter’s “Find friends” feature.
Many of them will follow you back.
And voila, you have followers who actually know you, care what you have
to say and will interact with you. That
is, after all, kind of the point.
So that was fun. And
as part of that little experiment, one of the people I followed is a friend of
mine, Liz Roop. (@LizRoop, follow
her.) Liz is a super popular Health IT PR
pro with more than 1,500 followers. She
acknowledged my follow, like all good social media users should, and said that
she would follow me back as soon as Twitter would let her. She said she was “stuck in Twitter algorithm
purgatory” and needed more followers so she could follow more.
It didn’t occur to me exactly what she meant then, but I’ve
been seeing this issue come up regularly and did some investigating. Seems that Twitter will only allow you to
follow 2,000 accounts unless you have more than a certain number of
followers. (That number seems to be a
bit of a moving target according to Steve Buttry.) So, there are two
choices. Get more followers or lose some
of those you’re following. This leads me
to number 2.
2. Unfollow inactive users. Sounds obvious, but can be so tedious.
Not any more. There’s an app for
that. Or rather, a few internet
services. Ranging from very simple, unTweeps, to a more detail-rich ManageFlitter.
Finally, here’s a freebie from me to you:
3. Don’t be annoying.
Seems obvious, but I guess it’s easy to forget that dumping all of your
tweets on Twitter at once is annoying and easily overlooked. Bufferapp
is great for scheduling tweets. And if
you don’t want to guess about the best times to post, Tweriod has you covered. It checks your list of followers and lets you
know the times they are most likely to be online.
For more details on getting, keeping or losing followers on
Twitter, here’s some more info:
- 9ways to grow your Twitter following (ethically) – Tweeted today by @johnphutchins who is actively trying to increase his following. (Follow him, too!)
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