The problem with the 2000 limit is that Twitter are trying to catch spammers. If you have 180 more friends than followers, once you get to 2000 friends, they prevent you from adding new friends until your followers catch up. This is frustrating because you can't even follow back new followers, so after a while they may drop you because it is good manners and good business to follow those who follow you. You need new followers so you can get your follower to friend ratio back near 1:1 so once you get into this mess it's hard to get out. People like me can't DM you because you can't follow me, I have a hard time reaching out to you.
Let's take a look at a typical person in this jam: Using
http://Twitter.grader.com/godomininque we see she has 1998 friends and 1270 followers. She can add 2 friends then she will be stuck again. If we attract 730 new followers, she will have a 180 friend play area to add new people. But only 180 unless she calls Twitter and they take away the limit.
Now looking at Twinfluence.com: Dominique is number 315 on Twitter. This is primarily because she has 1,389,280 second order followers. These are not her followers but the followers of people she follows. If she sends a message and asks it to be retweeted, it might be picked up and resent by ALL of her followers so that over a million people would get sent the message. That's why it's important to be followed by the elites, people with lots of followers. Dominique has added a few elites because she is adding 64,479 second order followers per day, this is called having high velocity.
Twinfluence will only allow you a new measurement every 2 days because it stresses Twitter, so call back in 2 and see your improvement.
Let's look at a very generous elite, meet Guy Kawasaki.
He has 30,493 friends and 29,644 followers. Clearly he follows everyone back. If you are not following him, please do so now.
We need to follow some elites who don't follow back, because they tweet stuff that we need to know. But we don't need to follow people who don't follow us back if they contribute nothing. And we especially need to dump those people who follow us hoping that we will follow them back, then they immediately nuke us. How rude! To find those people use
http://useqwitter.com This is a brilliant service which emails you with the link to everyone who drops you. When I get a Qwitter I make a decision, do I need them? If I don't, I nuke them. If I am upset that they nuked me, I will tweet them and ask them to email me privately so I can explain why I need them.
So now as soon as you get a Qwitter, nuke them because most of them are dead wood as far as you are concerned. Nothing personal but they are using up your 2000 or 180 window, and give nothing back.
Now we need to find all the people who dumped us before we started using Qwitter. Yup, there's a good tool for that called
http://mytweeple.com It takes a while to run but be patient because it is a goldmine. It shows I have 3 followers that I am not following back. In this case they have issues which prevent anyone from following them at the moment.
Now click on "People You Follow". Notice Biz Stone has a huge following but follows only 162 back. He doesn't follow me, but he is one of the founders of twitter, so I follow him for obvious reasons. If he was someone I had no interest in, I would nuke him. You will probably find you have hundreds of people you really don't care about. Nuke 200 of them now. This will make space for the next step, adding elites.
The best tool for finding elites and especially ones who follow back is
http://mrTweet.net It's still being worked on but a real treasure. I find I have to follow them, then come back and type in
http://mrTweet.net/report/godominique to get it to work.
If you select menu item 2 above, it will suggest people who you forgot to follow back. We already covered that with MyTweeple. It runs a little slow, just a friendly warning.
The first option is key. It examines your network and suggests people you might like to follow, and tells you their probability of following you back. In my case it found 200 people. You need to look through the suggestions and pick ones that make sense to our plan. For example I was already following #11. I followed #13 because she tends to follow back, has over 5000 connections and tweets 11 times per day. She actually has nearly 700 more friends than followers, so you know she will follow you back. I followed #14 for a similar reason. I didn't follow Twitter reluctantly because I can't afford to follow anyone who will never follow me back (37,000 followers but only 30 friends).
I just checked StephAgresta and sure enough she is following me.
There's a new follower "suggester":
http://crazybob.org/twubble/ . I like it because it's quite fast and ingenious.
OK, I think that about does it. Let me know if I can be of further help!
Twitter 2000 fix
Linear Mode
