So, I took a couple days off from growing my follower list with Hummingbird, and the list actually still kept growing. When I picked back up on day 6, however, I quickly hit the Twitter imposed cap of 2,000 followees (people I’m following). Actually it was 2,001 for some strange reason – but after I hit this cap, Twitter wouldn’t let me follow any more people. My follower list continued to grow – I like to think it’s because I’m tweeting some good stuff – but of course not as fast as before. The cap is a supposedly a “soft cap,” though, and you can move beyond it.
Follower list growth slowed after I hit the 2,000 followee "Soft Cap"
According to this forum post, that’s because I only had 1,700 or so followers, and at this point, Twitter won’t let you follow more than 2,001 people until you have 1950 followers yourself. Again, this is just according to a forum post I read – and I plan to test the theory. Here’s the quote from the forum:
Question: How do I break through the 2,000 Following ceiling and are there other ceilings involved in building the Followings and Followers list?
Reply: This is actually really easy to do. Once you hit 2000, just un-follow some people.
If you are following 2000 and only have 1700 followers, un-follow 300, and then follow more.
Once you hit around 1950 followers, you will break through the 2000 cap, although twitter seems to set the number at 2001 as well.
Once you are over 2000, you can follow 10% more than the people who follow you.
So at 3000, you can only follow 10% more, which is 3300.
and so on…
4000 – 4400 etc.
Apparently this 2,000 followee cap hasn’t always been imposed – which is why you can find so many people following 25,000+ people on Twitter. They were likely following more than 2,000 people when Twitter implemented the rule (some time in 2008?), and were ‘grandfathered’ in.
If I’m really only going to be able to follow 10% more people than are following me from here on out, I imagine my list of followers will grow a little more slowly – but I’m going to keep at it, and keep you posted.
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