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
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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. Read the rest of this entry