Quit Crying: The Twitter 2000 Follow Limit Means Nothing
Published by Rodney Rumford August 14th, 2008 in business, twitter.
Quit Crying: The Twitter 2000 Follow Limit Means Nothing… Unless you are a friend collector and not many people follow you. OK. There is a new supposed limit on how many people that you can follow on twitter that is set somewhere near ~2000 people. This upper limit is actually a soft limit. As many people that choose (with no upper limit) to follow you can do so.
You can actually follow more than 2000 people if your ratio of followers vs. following is close to 1:1 or better. This means that there is actually somewhat of a behavioral algorithm at work here on twitters behalf. All the friend collectors that are whining can just go pound sand.
Twitter is trying to eliminate follower spam: people that go on friend collecting binges (or bots that do it on their behalf). Does anyone remember the bots that collected friends for myspace pages? Twitter is very different than myspace in many ways.
I have maintained since day 1 on twitter (I have been on twitter since December of 2006), that how many people you follow is only somewhat important. What REALLY MATTERS is WHO and HOW you connect with someone. What is the value of that relationship and associated influence that comes from that relationship/connection? I have stated that deciding who you follow and why can significantly impact the value of your network. The Who and Why are part of the strategy that ties to the desired use case of twitter for your business.
I am so glad I followed my own advice and only follow around 1300 people (about 1600 follow me). Not because the upper limit; but for the following reason. I can effectively listen to the thought leaders, friends, and a large enough cross section of the population to listen efficiently for news, trends and insights. I can maintain my network and have meaningful interactions at that level. These connections & relationships align with our desired use case of twitter.
I won’t go into the specific business use case for how I use twitter (for it is not obvious to all, and I don’t want to lay out my exact strategy & tactics here). But I am able to connect with the people that matter to me and to their friends. I suspect as the tool sets become more efficient the numbers on both sides of the equation will rise. It is the ratio and real world connections that matter.
It pains me when I see someone using twitter and they are following 2000 people and they have 10 followers. It tells me that they have not a clue about how to extract the highest business value from twitter.
twitter 2000 limit. not a big deal on 12seconds.tv
I’m glad to hear it’s not a big deal for you. That’s terrific. But for someone trying to promote or drive traffic, it’s annoying.
And the reason it’s annoying is that Twitter keeps that info secret until you hit the 2000 mark. Then, as more and more people start to follow you, you find you are unable to return the favor.
This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if Twitter was honest about it, rather than giving you no info (and no customer service when you try to find out about it).
It amazes me when people decide that because something isn’t important to them, than it shouldn’t matter to anyone else, and those it does matter to are just cry babies.
Goggle Twitter and ZDNet, and you can see how this is impacting others, not friend-collectors but large corporations who were using Twitter to augment customer service, only to be stopped in their tracks by Twitters complete lack of customer service.
Funny how some people decide they’re an authority on something with no information…
It is so obvious when somebody starts following you and has over 1,000 people that they are follolwing and 4 people who follow them that they don’t get it. Gathering all of those people to annoy doesn’t make any sense to me, but they do it. The whole idea of twitter and other social media sites is to converse, develop relationships and make connections that add value to other people. Following lots of people without them following you back is like singing in the shower or talking to yourself. (maybe somebody likes doing that?) If they are only looking at the numbers, then not enough time is spent LISTENING to what others are saying and finding ways to interact.
Ken,
We have done extensive research. Please share the link to the ZD net article to show how this limit is impacting large corporations. Can’t seem to locate it anywhere.
Twitter did make a policy change. As a platform owner of a free service that is their prerogative. This happens all the time in the world we live in. Many people still follow well over 2000 people. The limit is a soft limit based on the algorithm that twitter has implemented.
You missed 2 critical points in the post.
1. There is no limit to how many people can follow you. You following people does not drive traffic. People following you (no limit), listening, caring and engaging is what drives valuable traffic. Do not follow a shotgun approach.
2. You can’t follow them back and return the favor because because you collected too many people and no one collected you back (saw no value or had no interest in what you were sharing).
Suggestion: unfollow people that don’t follow you and start to build relationships with people that are following you and have interest in connecting.
But, I could be wrong. It sounds like it does matter to you.
Rodney,
I am not sure your extensive research would be the best fit for everyone. I agree with Ken on this one. I want the ability to use a social network tool to meet new people and not be cut off because the service can’t handle it or a few people that use the service decided how best to run my company. Twitter has great value and if you look at most of the members they are internet professionals looking to meet people and drive traffic. I am happy to remove people I am following who don’t turn out to have value for me or not be a good fit. I am pretty sure that of all the people on Twitter that there are more than 2000 people that my product or service could be a benefit to and if they decide not to follow me in return I fully understand that. As Ken stated … just because your service doesn’t need a large following doesn’t mean I might not be looking to BUILD one by meeting as many new people as possible. I am not a spammer. I have a service I am sharing info about. If they don’t want it I accept that. I will never ask them again. But on Twitter I might not have the chance anyway.
If Twitter has decided they do not want to be a service for larger internet companies that is their choice to limit it as you stated. But … they should tell you up front they are a more “personal” service than one for larger groups.
This is a great new world we live in and the opportunities are fantastic. Don’t try and keep others from having access to it. We might have bigger plans than you do and that’s ok. Capitalism (done in a professional manner) is a great thing!
Good Luck and Thanks for your thoughts.
Rich
Rodney,
Interesting how you claim to have done extensive research, yet you couldn’t find a story when I gave you the two terms to Google.
Here’s the link:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=154
As far as those who haven’t “returned the favor”, many have, but most have not, yet. Many people on Twitter don’t post every hour, or even every day. My goal is to get our show out to as many as possible. Those who aren’t interested don’t need to follow me, and can very easily stop me from following them. This isn’t as though I’m spamming their email in-boxes.
And I didn’t miss any points in your post, though thanks for assuming I did. Just because I don’t agree with your approach and lack of understanding does not make me wrong.
Ken
Nancy,
You nailed it right on the head! BAM!
Ken,
I read the article. The article you reference is unrelated to the current limits and was actually a spam algorithm issue they were working on that was changed a day or so after the post. The bottom line is that they are continually evolving in what sorts of limits they impose based upon what sorts of behavior they are trying to drive (facebook does the same thing all the time) amongst users.
Don’t focus on traffic; focus on adding value. This is the long term approach that will always work on twitter (or most social eco-systems for that matter) Great content & relationships will organically drive traffic.
Again look at the august 7th post that I referenced from twitters blog. http://blog.twitter.com
It might appear that twitter is not the right tool set to drive you traffic in the ways that you want. If you are uncomfortable with operating in their rapidly changing ecosystem (and changing rules) then you might want to reconsider if you should even use twitter.
Read Nancy’s reply.
Cheers!
This is an excellent post and I couldn’t agree more. RIGHT ON!
I was actually going to write about this issue on my blog as well. If people truly undersood the power of the social web — and were using vehicles like Twitter correctly — they’d realize that it’s about BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS, not aggregating as many people as you can for purposes of ‘promoting’ (which, in essence, is them just yelling their message to the masses with the online equivalent of a bullhorn).
Personally, I want to have as much of a personal connection as I can with my following/followers, and as a result, my ratios are very close to 1:1 and I do not tweet when I’ve reached a certain # of followers that people seem to think make them popular or important.
If you want to advertise or market your products and services, there are plenty of vehicles through which to do that on the web. In my opinion, while there are halo brand-building and marketing benefits of Twitter, that is NOT the main driver, and I am in support of limits designed to curtail overt, in-your-face sales messages and behavior.
Twitter is such a powerful tool for connecting with like-minded individuals, building meaningful relationships and growing your business — and network — ORGANICALLY based on substantive conversations and exchanges, and if more people embraced that concept, and were using it to that end, these limits would NOT be an issue.
If you get a friend request and except it, then the person starts spamming you, or is really annoying, you can just un-friend list them. Problem solved. So why does Twitter feel the need to tell you how many friends you can have.
A lot of the people on my friend list, on any of the sites I belong to, are there to keep up with the links I post to articles I write. This is a great source of promotion for my website. I’d hate to be turned off if I finally got 2000 followers.