The Twitter "No Follow" Zone

[tpw]

Twitter has a rule that you can only follow up to 110% of the number of people who follow you, once you have began to follow more than 2000 people...

If you have started following more than 2000 people, in order to follow more people, you need to selectively decide who in your existing list you want to unfollow... You will need to drop your "follow list" to under 2200 to be able to add new people...

Twitter was smart on this account...

They understand their network better than most marketers, and they also understand how to throttle the abuse...

They know that the average person has up to 300 people in their personal circle of friends... But they also understand that business people network with each other and therefore some business people will have a larger circle of influence...

They realize that those who follow others for the ego-centric "follow-back" numbers probably are actually abusing Twitter resources by "following" people whom they do not care to watch...

So Twitter understood the need to throttle this kind of abuse of its resources...

They figure that if you actually care about what the people you follow are saying, then you should be reading what they write... And they figure that once we are following more than 2000 people, you probably will never be able to keep up with what individual people are writing within the noise of chatter ...

This is why the 110% rule never kicks in, until you have passed 2000 people that you follow...

So bear in mind that once you are following more than 2000 people, your "following" activities will be throttled by Twitter to only allow you to "follow" no more than 10% more people than the number of people who "follow" you in return...

Twitter was designed to help people to socially interact with each other... It was not designed to help marketers market their wares... Twitter tolerates such behavior, only because people do discuss products and services in normal social interactions...

If you want to be successful as a marketer on Twitter, bear this tip in mind... You will do far better treating your contacts as people who want to socialize with other people... So socialize with your followers at every opportunity...

Twitter was never designed to be a mass-marketing platform, and you know what, it does not work well as one either...

[Klaas]

This 110% rule has been active for a while. And I must say I'm happy it exists. I've been experimenting with auto-mass-follow tools, only to end up with 3000 "spammers" following me. No one interested in conversations, and maybe 0.1% clicking the occasional link I did post.

After realizing the exact same thing tpw posted about, I've now build a follower base of around 300 people simply by interacting with people. Way more fun, and the best thing is.. they're interested in my occasional link and even willing to retweet them. So yes, use it for socializing and you'll find that marketing through similar interest is way more effective than the mass-follow-thing.

[theseoguys]

I'd just like to be the guy with 100,000 followers and I am folowing a handful. That would be my ideal situation.

[Steve Holmes]

I am glad they do this because it stops so much of the spam you see now.

I don't see how you can possibly follow 2000 conversations yet alone any more..

[mywebwork]

I knew they had a threshold but I wasn't aware it was 110%.

Thanks, explains why I have been in the "No Follow" zone for a while!

Bill

[theseoguys]

Realistically, nobody can keep track of 200 people let alone, 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000.

[Rob Maggs]

I've built my following up from zero to 13000 followers in a year. I never had a problem with the following limits and I've been using software to find targeted followers. My content is a mixture of posts from Twaitter, some custom feeds built using yahoo pipes and Twitterfeed which RT interesting posts in my niche, the latest news in my niche and the occasional "Real" input from me.

The automated Retweeting is good and gives me an opportunity to build relationships with my followers. I do pretty well online and I get a fair percentage of business from Twitter...If you do things right, then the Twitter Nofollow rule is not going to be a problem.

[Aleksejs Zuravlovs]

I didn`t know that! Thanks, but twitter is not that good for marketing anyways, when You got thousands of followers Your message will "disappear" in few minutes..

[Wonderful Warrior]

Originally Posted by theseoguys

Realistically, nobody can keep track of 200 people let alone, 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000.

Keeping up with 200 people is no problem as long as you don't follow spammers and you use the "list" function.

Most people who you follow don't talk too much.

[jazbo]

I lose track of 10 conversations, thats why twitter is such a spamfest.