My Twitter Slap Took me by Surprise

It was about three months ago that I was first introduced to Twitter, along with other Web 2.0 sites. I thought it was a great place to interact with other like-minded people and signed up. I also opened accounts with Facebook and YouTube at the same time.

I immediately became active on all three sites and was learning as I went along. I had been advised that according to Twitter etiquette, it would be proper for me to follow back everyone that followed me. There was a free tool that was available that allowed me to do this, and to also automatically thank people for following me. I got everything set up and then started following people that I found interesting. Some of these people automatically followed me back, whereas others didn’t.

I paid very little attention to the numbers as the weeks went on. There are three sets of numbers at the top right-hand corner of the home Twitter page. It lists “followers”, “following” and “updates”. I was being fairly active on the site and was posting a few times a day. Each day I would add a few more people to follow so my “following” number was increasing. I didn’t pay too much attention to how many people were following me back.

About a week ago I was in the process of adding more people that I wanted to follow, when my account seemed to freeze up and I was unable to follow anyone. I thought that Twitter was just having a technical glitch and forgot about it until the next day, when the very same thing happened. I sent a ‘tweet’ out asking others if they were experiencing the same problem. One person replied that I had received a “Twitter Slap”. I had heard of a “Google Slap” where Google punishes you for not adhering to their rules and regulations. Well, apparently this was much the same thing, but nowhere near as serious as a slap from Google.

It was explained to me that I was now following 2000 people but only 1700 were following me. Twitter has a rule that once you reach 2000 people you have to have a certain number of people following you back, otherwise they freeze you from continuing to follow others. So now I knew what my problem was….but how was I going to resolve it.

After doing a Google search, I was surprised to find well over one hundred tools to enhance your Twitter experience. I had to sift through them all because I was looking for a tool that would help me reduce the number of people I was following. I didn’t want to just go in and arbitrarily unfollow people, so I was looking for something very specific. The first thing that I needed was a list of the people who were not following me back.

Here are the two tools that I highly recommend to get the job done.

www.friendorfollow.com…this site lists all the people who are not following you back; www.twitoria.com…this site lists all the people who have not posted for a while;

It then became an easy task to choose the people I wanted to unfollow so that I could free up my ability to follow others again. It has worked like a charm.

I would suggest you check your numbers and if you are getting close to following 2000 people, then I suggest you check to see how close the number of people following you is. If it is just about the same, then you will have nothing to be concerned about. So far, this is the only Twitter slap that I am aware of, but no doubt there are others.

If you are signed up with Twitter, please follow me. If you are not, then hop on over to Twitter and get signed up. It only takes a minute and it’s free. If you follow me, I will follow you back. You can see me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/janshimano.

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