ObnoxiousAcorns

If you’ve been on Twitter for any point of time, you know every Friday there are hashtaged FollowFriday tweets with account names following. If you are new to twitter, you might not have any idea what #followfriday is. #Followfriday is used to reccommend all the person’s followers to follow whoever they placed after the #followfriday. When #followfriday first started, it actually worked. Most people would actually follow the person. However, as the #followfridays progressed, the number of people actually following the people have decreased because either it’s the same people as last #followfriday, or there are too many #followfridays for them to follow. Now, #followfriday is used moreas a way to tell the a person you have been tweeting all week that you are very interesting. So technically, #followfriday has turned into #peopleontwitterIfindinterestingFriday (although not as catchy).

-2009 Nicole Turpin.

Currently Twitter restricts the number of people you can follow at 2001, meaning once you are following 2001 people you can’t follow anyone else. There is an exception to this rule though, Twitter allows you to follow around 110% of the people that are following you, and that is why you’ve seen accounts that are following 1000’s of people.  What this means is that once you get 1800 followers, you can begin to follow more than 2000 people. That also means that if 3000 people are following you, then you are able to follow 3300, 4000 means 4400 etc.

So there two things you can do here:
o Get a bunch of followers, who will follow you but you won’t follow them.
o Reduce the number of people who you are following that aren’t following you.

You probably wouldn’t be in this situation if option one was viable, so we are going to have to go with option two and reduce the number of people you’re following that aren’t following you back. While there are a few utilities that allow you to mass unfollow those that aren’t following you, that approach is not always recommended because there are some people you may want to continue to follow and you also may want to give people who you have recently followed a chance to follow back. While you can start your unfollowing anywhere, I usually recommend starting with the oldest group first, because if they aren’t following you now, they probably never will.
If you are following 2000 people, you don’t have to keep clicking next to get to the oldest group,  this link should take you right there.  That number is only the last page if you are following 2000 people, you’ll need to change the 100 to another number if you are following more or less and want to move to the last page.  That number is the number you are following divided by 20. From this page you can see quickly who is following you and who is not.  Those that are following you will have “direct message”:

To stop following this person just press the remove button, to the right of their name and you’ll get a confirmation message that you are no longer following that person.

Once you have unfollowed everyone you want on the page, click the “previous” link on the bottom of the page to go to the next page. You don’t have to unfollow everyone at once, but you should aim for unfollowing 50-100 to start.  Remember the most you can follow that aren’t following you back is 200, if you want to be able to follow more than 2000.

If there are many celebrities and such that you wish to follow, you either need to get them to follow you, or create another account and follow them there. As you continue to grow followers, you may have to trim unfollowers in the future so this won’t necessarily be a one time thing.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me at @azlen or Nicole at @obnoxiousacorns.

Article by Brad White: