Back in July of ’09 Twitter had some problems and I wrote a post to address them. Since then I had dropped my blog and am just now starting up again. That was my most popular page but now most of the information is out of date or even unnecessary. That being the case, I thought I might offer a fresher, shorter version.

Here’s the problem: Once you have over 2,000 followers, Twitter starts watching your follower to followee ratio. They use a very simple rule – you can only follow 10% more people than are following you. For instance, this morning I had 24,668 followers. If I multiply that by 1.1 (or 110%) I get 27,134.8 which, of course we can round up to 27,135 since .8 followers gets kind of messy. I am actually following, 26,159 so I can follow another 976 people before I am blocked from following any more.

Here are a couple more examples:

  • If I am following 1,000 people and 50 are following me – I can follow another 1,000 people. (Remember, you can follow up to 2,000 people before the rule kicks in.
  • If 2,500 people are following me, I can follow 1.1 X 2,500 or 2,750 people before I am blocked from following any more.

So what if we want to follow more people but are close to or our limit? Should we just start unfollowing everyone? Great news, you don’t have to unfollow Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber or Britney Spears. I found this great FREE tool that will let you get your follower list in shape in no time flat!

JustUnfollow.com is a great tool that will look at the people you are following then see if they are following you back. If they’re not, it will list them but this is the best part and what sets this tool apart from some others – It will list them in order by who you have been following the longest. It not only presents you with a list of people that you are following that are not following you back from oldest forward but it also puts a handy “Unfollow” link beside each one of them.

What could be better? As they say on the info-commercials, “But wait, there’s more”! The premium version has a “Whitelist” button so you don’t lose the people you really want to follow anyway, like Ashton, Justin and Britney. You simply “whitelist” everyone you want to keep and they never show up with the “Unfollow” link beside them.

Additionally, the premium version will so let you unfollow more than 100 people a day.(yes the free version is limited to 100 per day) and it has an algorithm to allow you to not list those that it thinks will follow you soon. This is a very slick package and well worth the $4.95 per year upgrade price.

A couple of tips before you start deleting your followers:

  • Don’t delete more than 400 per day. You will use up your APIs and the Twitter gods start looking at you funny.
  • Don’t follow a bunch of people one day and delete all of them that don’t follow back the next – again the Twitter gods get angry.

If this has been helpful, please let me know. If not, I’d like to know that too. If it is inaccurate in ANY way, I NEED to know that so please write. You can write me via my contact form or leave a comment below.

Thanks!
Den