Not Quite the Twitter Master …
Today’s post is brought to you by the words follow, follower, followers, follows and Tweet.
You are following, right?
So, here’s what happened. I was on this Mission to Twitter and it was all awesome. I got over 750 followers in the first 24 hours and I was pretty stoked about it. I was convinced that if I followed 1000 new people every day - obviously, they were all going to follow me back - I’d be able to amass a group of at least 20,000 followers in about a month.
I know … but I got excited. And apparently, I also behaved like a spammer.
Your account may not be allowed to perform this action. Try logging out and in again.
Twitter has rules about spammers. I tried logging out and in again and when nothing happened, I did a little investigating and turns out, you can only follow a certain percentage over the number of people who follow you. Twitter won’t tell you the exact percentage but I can tell you that you get cut off around 2001 Follows to 750 Followers. So … you know … whatever percentage that would be.
This of course made me look a little more closely at some of the people I was following. And, thank Smoking Baby I did. See, the way I found all these people was that I went to people I knew on Twitter and then I just followed everyone they were following. I mean, at first I tried to be selective with whom to follow, but when you’re going for 1000 at a time, you quickly stop caring about the people behind the accounts and just go for volume. So, without even glancing at the names, I clicked follow buttons until I hit the max.
Here’s what happens next:
I decide to sit back for a while and let things settle. I figured that with the rate of followers I was getting, including of course all the lovely ladies looking for lovin’, I’d have a good enough Followers-to-Follows ratio to get back in the game and start clicking again. Then my Followers started going away.
I went from a high of something like 763 to sub-700 in two days. Now, I know there’s some Twittiquette on follow backs so I decided to purge my list of Follows so I could start following my Followers.
Once I started looking through profiles to make the cuts I discovered that I had chosen to follow no less than 15 different religious wackos, and I mean some real zealot-y, scary-ass wackos. One even claimed to be the actual God here on Earth. (The Pope?) AND on top of that … I had also selected several members of the motherfuckin’ Tea Party.
Let’s just say, lesson learned.
