Twitter will not allow me to follow anyone else until I have more followers. They say in the help section there is a formula they use to determine how many people you can follow. But now when people follow me I can’t follow them back and some of them unfollow me. What can I do?
Twitter does this to stop people from following hundreds upon thousands of people with the hopes that they will be followed in return. Luckily, they’ve done a number of things lately to make this less of an issue.
Remember that following people does two things:
- Allows them to DM you (there is now a workaround to this, more on that later)
- Adds them to your home feed
I’d contend that after several hundred people the home feed becomes too noisy anyway. So the solution is: LISTS.
Make lists of people by category:
- Best Friends
- Clients
- Leads
- Comedians
- Social Business Superstars (go ahead, you can add us)
This way you can look at Twitter through a variety of lenses. I have my own way of doing it but I can save that for another time if there’s enough interest to see how I segment my audience. Once you get into using lists, programs like Tweetbot, Hootsuite, or some other column based Twitter client, will allow you to monitor multiple streams of information.
Twitter used to have a limit of 20 lists per account, but my sources tell me that limit has been increased substantially.
Doing this will also allow you to unfollow a large number of people thereby putting your account into a much more attractive ratio. Try to stay near 1:1 or better.
If you want more people to have DM access, you can simply turn on the ability for anyone to send you a DM if you’d like (though I wouldn’t recommend it).