Have you recently found out that for some reason you can no longer follow any more accounts on Twitter and no matter how often you ask, “Why Can’t I Follow More People On Twitter” – the answers that come are vague?
There are a few reasons why you cannot follow more accounts on Twitter and usually, it has something to do with the follower to following ratio.
Twitter doesn’t want someone following 20,000 accounts in a SPAMMY type fashion with no real interest in what those accounts are tweeting about. To prevent these types of actions Twitter has limits to how many people you can follow in a day and how many people you can be following without them following you back.
Essentially, Twitter limits the number of people you can follow unless enough follow you back. In order to be able to follow more people, you’re going to either need to get more followers or unfollow those accounts you’re not interacting with.
All of this is good too! Twitter does this in an effort to stop Spam and robots from building up an artificially inflated following ratio.
Is it okay to follow a lot of accounts in an effort to get new followers?
In my opinion, yes. I find around 20% of the people I follow will follow me back sometimes the ratio is much higher depending on who I target.
Who I target depends on which account I’m working on. For instance, I have a client who is a well known political commentator. His audience is very obviously on one side of the political aisle making them very easy to find. So, when I follow this targeted community we have a pretty good follow back ratio of around 30%.
In general, Twitter says,
“Twitter accounts can follow up to 5,000 accounts. Once you reach that number, you may need to wait until your account has more followers before you can follow additional accounts.”
They also tell us that:
Every Twitter account is able to follow up to 400 accounts per day. Verified Twitter accounts are able to follow up to 1,000 accounts per day.
This means you can follow up to 400 accounts a day that align with your target market or demographic which can be pretty powerful. You don’t have to do all that following on your own either, at the bottom of this blog is a list of tools that can help automate some of this.
If you’re a politician looking to attract more Democratic or Republican followers this means you can follow 400 other members of your party without any worry – potentially gaining hundred of new follow-backs every single day.
Why Do People Follow Back?
For most people, they follow you back because they are interested in your content which is also why being strategic and not just random is really helpful. Think who your target audience is, what hashtags are they interacting with that self-identify them as valuable to your goals and objectives?
Some people follow back because they feel like it’s polite. On my personal Twitter account, I feel no need to follow someone back unless their tweets add value to my life or business.
If you’re having trouble gaining a following for your business or brand you need to think about the various ways you can add value to your online community. If you’re having trouble figuring that out you should hire an expert like, ahem, myself.
You may also want to inquire about a Social Media Audit to figure out how you’re doing overall.
The best way to grow your following on Twitter is to stay consistently active, add value, don’t just tweet articles…and have fun.
Follow me at DavidaPride and let me know how your Twitter growth strategy is working!
A Few Of My Favorite Twitter Tools
- Sprout Social is a great social media management tool for scheduling tweets, listening for reactions, and monitoring their performance.
- UnFollowerStats makes life really easy if you want to see who’s not following you back so you an unfollow them if necessary and only costs around $5/month.
- Twitter Auto Follower Pro makes life easy for following people automatically once you’ve identified a niche’ list of targets.
- Twitter Search will help you find where your targets are. Search by keyword, phrase, or zip code.
