Now that you’re on Twitter and start to follow interesting people to connect with, all of a sudden a limit pops up. The last several days I’ve met quite some that ran into a 2000 follow limit. What’s going on here?

Official response from twitter on Twitter Blog: Follow Spam

What is “Follow Spam?”

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you’re actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back. Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye.

As you can imagine, this is a problem. In extreme cases, these automated accounts have followed so many people they’ve threatened the performance of the entire system. In less-extreme cases, they simply annoy thousands of legitimate users who get an email about this new follower only to find out their interest may not be entirely…sincere. On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet—there is an opportunity for us to learn more about this use case and work to provide a better experience.

Actually, I really agree with this. It makes sense. There must be a ratio close to 1:1 to make communications work. It is supposed to be a mutual thing. It doesn’t make sense to follow thousands of people and nobody is following you back. It is annoying however that you cannot follow back new followers.

These are a couple of things you can do when you are stopped by the 2000 limit:

1. Go through your list of follows and clean it up. Do you really want to follow all 2000 of them?
2. Engage in good conversation with your followers. Help them and they may retweet some of the things you help them with. This could lead to new people starting to follow you.
3. Stop worrying about this limit and keep using twitter what it’s meant for: good conversation with other people.

Some sources mention a difference of 180 between follows and followers but I could not verify the source of that information. So let’s open the discussion: anyone found out what the rules really are on twitter’s soundbarrier at 2000?

Did you break the soundbarrier? If yes, what did you do (if anything)?

Feel free to post your comments and let’s find out.