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