Twitter: Getting Over the Two Thousand Follower Roadblock

Posted on September 22, 2015 by cathleentownsend — 3 Comments

You may or may not know this, but being able to follow over two thousand people on Twitter can be a pain. According to Twitter Support “… every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve followed 2,000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following.” https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916

I finally made it through, but I had to bump my head on the Twitter ceiling a few times to make it happen. I’ve read that if you had a ratio of over 80% of followers to following, you were probably fine. Nope, wrong in my case. I had over 1,650 followers, and I still got the dreaded pop-up error message. There might as well have been a squirrel in my birdhouse.

So, what to do? The best move is to do some housekeeping. There are a variety of unfollowing services out there; I use ManageFlitter (https://manageflitter.com/unfollow). It’s free, which is always a good thing, although you can only unfollow 100 people in a twenty-four hour period using their service. But this is actually an advantage. Twitter also prohibits “aggressive following and unfollowing,” the latter being defined as unfollowing hundreds of people at a time. So if you’re limited to unfollowing a hundred at one go, that keeps you from breaking another Twitter guideline.

And you can always go back into your followers and unfollow a few manually. Using an automated service has no effect on your ability to do this. It’s a pain, but if you just need room for twenty or so, then you can use an automated unfollowing service the next day.

ManageFlitter gives you users you’ve followed with the most recent first, which is the exact opposite of how you want them. But under the Unfollow bar at the top, there are three choices. Choose the second–order, and it will expand to a larger menu. Choose follow order from the lower right, and now the Twitter accounts you’ve followed will be displayed in the order that you followed them. It makes sense to get rid of accounts that have been there the longest.

They will ask if you want to tweet about all the people you’ve found who aren’t following you. This is just my recommendation, but I really wouldn’t. You’re already deleting people from your feed. You don’t have to tell them you’re doing it. That seems unnecessarily snippy to me, and that’s not a wise impression to leave online.

The first time I did this, my feelings were hurt. There were people on there that I’d had pleasant conversations with, person-to-person, and they hadn’t thought me worth following. But I got over it, clicked the unfollow button on the left, and moved on. The only accounts that remained were those with excellent content that I really didn’t want to lose. Everyone else went.

Click away at unfollows to clean up your account. There’s a little counter on the right to tell you when you get to a hundred. When you unfollow your 101st, a little pop-up box will tell you that’s all you can do that day. Click the okay box, and your account unfollows those users that you’ve chosen. You’re done. Now you have room to follow another hundred people.

I had to do this three times. Once around 1,650 followers, the next around 1,750, and the last around 1,820, a number that I really thought would let let through. For me, it took 1,872 followers to get Twitter to let me blow through the 2,000 follower ceiling. Your mileage may vary, but I figured I’d throw it out there. Don’t get discouraged. It’s a pain, but so are a million Twitter bots, and apparently having the follower limit restricts their effectiveness. So it’s all in a good cause.