This is a Twitter 101 Post – those of you who are Twitter Power users you might want to read through and make comments about your experience with this particular situation…<hint>
Twitter Tool: Tweepi http://tweepi.com/ saved my day. Those of you who have bumped up against that 2000 Twitter ceiling know the frustration of trying to figure how to get your Following List down to way under the 10% head space you need to continue enjoying adding to the people you WANT to Follow. What? Didn’t know Twitter imposes a ratio limit?
Twitter says~
Additional limits if you are following 2000 or more people:
The rules about aggressive following and follow churn still apply. In addition, every user can follow 2000 people total. Once you’ve followed 2000 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. When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—… (see all the Following rules)
In other words…you can not follow more than 110% of your followers after you have 2000 followers. Most people don’t know about this until they hit that limit and get an error message when they try to Follow someone. Not a fun experience – especially if you are trying to Follow your new social media client…yeah – happened to me.
The path to finding Tweepi (more on how to use it in a bit) is very interesting. I’m in a LinkedIn Group “Marketers on Twitter”. Today I got my daily digest for the group with this 2000 ceiling topic. All the comments were helpful including those from @studio525 and @bevisible who told us all about Tweepi. I hit the 2000 ceiling awhile ago and had to painstakingly unfollow hundreds of people – it was hard and NOT fun. Then after I got that all sorted out – Twitter decided to delete thousands of spam accounts and it put me back to the 2000 ceiling again – and I had to do the process all over again!
Now – you can enjoy the ease and satisfaction of sorting through your Twitter with a fabulous tool. This is how I cleaned out my Twitter account in under 45 minutes (approx 20 minutes for each process if you have over 2000 Followers/Following):
- Go to http://tweepi.com/
- Sign In with your Twitter account
- I suggest you first “Flush” your account
- Then “Reciprocate” with people who are following you
A bit of refinement:
Use the sorting tool and the column options tool – then decide if it is easier to Select All and then unselect people or visa versa – you will see this once on the site. I figured it out – you can, too. If you need extra help – feel free to comment to this post – and I will explain it in more detail.
Flushing – this will pull up all the people who are NOT Following you. Now, if you are like me, Oprah isn’t returning the favor, but when you find your friends aren’t Following you back – then you have to make a decision if you are going to continue to Follow them. If you enjoy their tweets – then keep them, but if you are trying to make room – Unfollow them. Mostly, though, you will find LOTS of people who you no have connection to – or desire to Follow anymore. Many pages I selected All and Unfollowed the whole bunch.
Reciprocating – this will pull up all the people who are following YOU and you aren’t Following them back. This was a very interesting process. I found a few people I wanted to Follow and somehow missed them when they first Followed me, but mostly it was a huge collection of spam and XXX people. This just made me feel good that I don’t use those auto-following programs (even though tweepi does have an interesting tool called Geeky Follow…try it and tell me if you like it.).
They also have this niffy tool called the Geeky CleanUp:
So, you’re following a few thousand people on Twitter. You must have noticed that many of these users do not engage in conversations, never retweet anybody, or simply just ramble about nonsense stuff all day long (no links to useful content whatsoever!). You can use Tweepi’s geeky cleanup tool to filter these people out and unfollow them.
There you go – another post by your technology cheerleader – enjoy!
