Okay, I’ve heard of the Google Slap but I had not heard of the Twitter Slap till 3 minutes ago. Let me share this eye opening article with you. Especially since I’m starting to get into Twitter recently.
Enjoy
Gary Harvey
http://twitter.com/GaryHarvey << Follow me on Twitter
==========

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 started to be active on all three sites and was learning as I went along. As far as Twitter was concerned, I was told that it was proper etiquette to follow back everyone that followed me. There was a tool available where you could automatically follow those following you and also post a tweet to them thanking them for following you. I set this up and started following people that I thought were interesting. Some of those people also were using this particular tool so they automatically followed me back. However, a number of people did not have the tool and for whatever reason decided not to follow me back.

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 as I was now following 2000 people, Twitter was applying a mathmatical formula to the ratio of following/followers. If you fell outside the boundaries, then they would freeze you, preventing you from following anyone else until you brought your figures in line. So now I knew what the problem was….but how was I going to fix it.

I did a little research and was amazed to find literally over one hundred different tools that you could use to enhance your Twitter experience. I was searching for something that would help me reduce the number of people I was following. I didn’t just want to go in and arbitrarily unfollow others, so I was looking for something that would make the job easier. For one thing I needed to know the people that were not following me back.

The following two tools were instrumental in getting 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.

For those of you who are getting close to following 2000 people, it would be a good idea to take some action now so that you don’t run into this difficulty. I am sure there are other slaps but as of now, I don’t know what they are or when they will occur.

If you are already on Twitter please follow me. If you are not on Twitter, then I suggest you go to twitter.com and sign up. It’s free….and then you can follow me. My twitter name is janshimano. I will follow you back.

Jan Shimano was District Manager for Health & Welfare Canada for a number of years. She was also self-employed as a Nutritional Consultant. She is presently a Business & Health Coach and runs her own internet marketing company from her residence in British Columbia. Jan invites you to drop by her website and also to check out her videos at http://www.youtube.com/1jinny


Related posts:

  1. How To Avoid Your Hosting Account Getting Suspended, Like Mine WasToday
  2. Javea News And Information Websites
  3. Privacy Policy Plugin Conforms To New Google Rules

Tagged with: • • • • • •

Filed under: Personal Blog

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!