Spring Cleaning My Twitter Account

I tried to follow someone on Twitter the other day and received a message to say that I was unable to follow any more accounts right now. The last time I received that message was four years ago when I was first building my Twitter following and hit the 2,000 ceiling. If you don't know, Twitter has in place a system which prevents aggressive following. If you hit 2,000 follows and have fewer than 1,800 followers you can't follow any more until your follower numbers catch up. There is basically a 10% leeway between follow and follower numbers. When I received the message the other day I was following around 5,900 and had around 5,300 followers.

The answer to my problem was to do a cleanup. In the past I have used a tool called Twitter Kharma but this time when I tried to load it, it never fully loaded so I went to Google to search for an alternative. I found a web-based utility called Tweepi. This tool seems to work really well. The approach I took was to unfollow anyone who hasn't tweeted for a very long time. By removing anyone who hadn't tweeted in more than two years I reduced the number of members I was following by around 1,400 accounts! Why was I following so many useless accounts? I can fully blame my follow activity from all those years ago. I was recommended a follow back tool at the time which automated my follow backs. I don't use these utilities anymore and now that I know better would definitely think better of them.

What has your experience of Twitter following been?

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