Twitter's Following 5000 Cap
So I have been cruising along with Twitter and my latest site Spiral Revolutions. It has been a very good source of traffic and engagement for me. However, this week I was surprised that I could not follow anyone new as I had hit the Following 5000 cap.
Gaining Followers
I had used the technique of following people on a near daily basis to get return followers since I started using Twitter. I would go in find someone that was in a similar niche and follow a few of their followers.
It worked great and for about every 5 people I followed, 3 followed back. This now has me sitting at 5000 followed and all but 3000 follow me. Now that I am capped though, how do I move forward?
What's Next?
Well the first thing I did was read up on what Twitter had to say about it and they pretty much say that the only way to raise your cap is through obtaining more followers. Sounds easy enough, but the way I was doing it won't work.
I could start unfollowing people to follow more, but you have to be careful about that on two fronts. First Twitter has rules set up on how many you can unfollow. Secondly you risk losing a follower when you do this as well.
Personally I would rather not unfollow people. I followed all of them for a reason when I chose to do so in the first place. Plus, I don't want to risk violating Twitter's rules, so let's just say no to this option.
I decided at first I just have to ramp up my activity on Twitter with the assumption that the more active I am the more my stuff gets out there and the more I get followed. Will this work fast enough though? The other downside is that I cannot follow the new people back.
Any Ideas?
So I would ask you, the Wealthy Affiliate community, what is the best way to gather followers without following them first? Let me also throw out that I am not interested in purchasing followers either. Otherwise I am completely open to suggestions!
I know there is a Google+ share thread here, but I have not found any official Twitter share threads. The only ones I have found seemed very old and dated.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts and support.
Keep working it!
James W D
Like you I've been following people in my niches and also everyone here that I can identify. But, I also follow any random person who follows me ( as long as their home page isn't full of nudity or obscenities).
If I have to cut some loose at any point it won't be fellow WA members or people in my niches though....the 'others' will get the boot!
David
Reply
I had that issue when I followed 2000 and had only 1000 followers back, I did unfollow about 800 and after that I could follow people again
Other than that what I haven't been doing before but am doing now is actually doing more communication with Twitter members. If they are talking about something related to my niche I actually tweet to them about it. For example if someone was saying that they "don't know how to create a website and need help" I'd tweet them saying "Creating a website is pretty easy. Best of all you can build one for FREE! This article explains more", then I add a link to one of my pages that explains how to build a free website.
I feel that this personal engagement brings in more quality traffic and when they respond to my tweet, I follow them and they usually follow back. Before the cap I was using the same technique as you of just following people talking about my niche but wasn't actually having interactions with them.
I know it's a bit more work but having this personal interaction is good in two ways. First, like I said, it drives more quality traffic to your site. And second, if the user interacts back (tweets back or re-tweets or likes you tweet) that gives even more exposure for you because all of their followers will see it. As you can see if you do this a dozen times a day and people actually interact back you exposure may sky rocket.
Anyway I just started this technique a few days ago since I hit my cap and thought it was a better way to go about things so you can give it a try if you want and let me know how it goes. Not everyone will interact back but don't worry about it, you're still tweeting and getting exposure from your initial tweet as people can view it and it's also keyword searchable so you win either way.
~Mike
