OK, I’ll admit it - my vanity has the better of me, and over the last couple of days, I’ve been trying to grow my twitter following as rapidly as possible. I know that twitter sets an initial ‘ceiling’ of following 2,000 people, and my two main accounts (one in my own name, the other for Flightmapping) were both approaching the 2,000 followers level, so I was curious to see how much further I could go.
No of course, all these nerdy statistics shouldn’t really matter, but I love numbers, and I like to find out how things work. So I pushed both accounts until I got the warnings, and then worked out the ratios. This is what I got:
- Flightmapping - following 2147 & 1951 followers - 91% followers : follows.
- Avery_James - following 2052 & 2251 followers - also 91% followers : follows.
Now I could have just looked at other accounts and seen what sort of ratios other large users get - does this figure go up or down as the number of followers gets bigger? Would twitter want to publish that? Probably not, they don’t seem to like people using third party software to grow their follower base, but then again ‘organic’ sites have never liked anything automatically coming along and ruining their systems, but there always will be cat and mouse here.
This is what twitter officially say on the matter:
What is aggressive following?
Following users is a way to see their updates in your timeline. If an account seems interesting, feel free to follow it! Many Twitter users receive email notifications when someone follows their account or check out the profiles of new followers to see if they share common interests. If some accounts are aggressively or indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention, it makes Twitter a less-nice place to hang out.
So wouldn’t it be easier just to follow a certain number of new accounts, wait for a certain proportion of them to follow back, and then unfollow those that don’t? Well, again, twitter have something to say about this:
What is aggressive follow churn?
If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, that’s fine! You can just visit the person’s profile page and then un-follow them. Aggressive follow churn is when an account repeatedly follows and un-follows large numbers of users. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change their follower-to-following ratio.
So the usual rules about common sense would appear to apply. Sure, it’s nice to watch those numbers tick over and see your following grow, but what’s the end game? I think it is time to get back to work!
