I hit a barrier I didn’t know existed. Over the past several months I’ve been adding people to my follow list by the scores. I look to follow anyone in ministry. There is no limit to how many people I’ll follow. I use TweetDeck to manage the people as well. So, I may be following thousands, but I’m much more connected to a select few. When anyone begins a conversation through a reply or direct message, they become part of the group that I follow more closely.

However, on Monday I went to follow a friend of mine who just started using twitter… but it wouldn’t let me follow him. Why? I’d hit the dreaded 2000 follow limit. What is this limit? I don’t know exactly. It seems to vary who hits it. Some people hit it, others don’t. The little bit of research I did showed that it isn’t just your ratio of followers to follows either. So, I’m kinda stuck until I figure out how to get past this twitter wall. (BTW, the twitter limit is a good thing. This keeps the spambots from taking over twitter and following people by the hundreds of thousands and hitting everyone with links for products.)

So, what am I doing now?

  1. I weeded out inactive follows. I used a site called Twitoria. It searches your follow list for people who have been inactive for 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks and so on. Twitter is loaded with people who signed up, used it for a day and then stopped. If I only have 2000 follows, I’m un-following those.
  2. I’m un-following the junk followers. This one is a little more time consuming. I open up my follow list and hover over each account. If you’re a SEO marketing genius or real-estate agent hocking land in Idaho, I’m un-following you. (you may be wondering why I’m following them to begin with. I use SocialToo to auto follow those who follow me. It’s an automatic way to follow people who might be worth following. However, the twitter idiots that are simply trying to follow every human being on earth in order to make a profit throw a wrench in this plan as I have to manually go through my follow list and un-follow them.) Unfortunately, I’ll probably end up un-following some of the wrong people. So, if you’re not a SEO genius and I un-follow you, I’m sorry. When I hover over people in my follow list, it shows me their profile. What their profile says tells me whether to un-follow or not. If you don’t have a profile, then I un-follow. So, if you’re not a SEO Genius or a Realtor from Idaho, make that known in your profile. 😉

So, last night I dumped over 300 from my follow list. Hopefully something will happen and I’ll be able to break through this 2000 limit as I don’t really have the time to manage it this closely.