Shortly after I hit that cap with Twitter I took some time off from building my Twitter accounts – so it’s been a few days since I posted an update. But just a couple days ago I was back at it – this time using a new method of identifying more targeted tweeps.
I mentioned in a previous post that I had hit the cap of 2,000 followers – meaning I was following 2,000 people and wasn’t being allowed to follow any more (regardless of whether I used Hummingbird to do the following). But only about 1,500 or so people were following me. So, the clear strategy at that point was to un-follow some people, and then find more targeted people to follow. But I recommend putting a little more thought into it to get the most bang for your follow. So that’s what I did.
After you get to the point of following 2,000 or more people, your strategy for gaining followers of your own must change. Up until that point, if you follow enough people, you’re bound to get some followers yourself. But after you follow 2,000 people, Twitter caps you, and you have to start really thinking about un-following the less targeted people in your follower list, and then following some more targeted people in their place. This is how I did it:
I un-followed about 700 people, to get my follower list back down to about 1,300. Then I tweeted, over the course of the day, about half a dozen tweets on a topic that was hyper relevant to the audience I want to follow me (prospective clients in a certain industry) – making sure that my last tweet was particularly intriguing. Then I found a Twitter user (using the Twitter user search) who had lots of followers in the industry I was targeting. I followed a bunch of that user’s followers, and surprise surprise, I found that the percentage who followed me back was much higher than when I followed people en masse.
And better than that, once I got more than about 1,800 followers, Twitter started raising the cap on the number of people I could follow myself…first to about 2,010…then when I had about 1,900 followers I was able to follow closer to 2,075. It seems like – just as I mentioned at the bottom of this post – you are allowed to follow about 10% more people than are following you.
So, I’m back on the climb…
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