Ask Callista is my (bi)weekly feature where I answer reader questions. 
NOTE: I’ll be changing this to biweekly so look for it every other Friday.
I’d love for you to join the conversation in the comments by adding your thoughts on the questions and/or my answers.
Find out more and how to submit your questions here. (You can get 5 bonus entries into the may buffet giveaway for submitting a question – ends 5/15)
The Questions
Dianna asks… I hit my limit of following 2,000– how do you go about not getting suspended by not going in and unfollow people and how do you remember who to keep on TWITTER??????
You can read all about twitter follow limits here is the part you want to know about:
Once you’ve followed 2000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow: this limit is different for every user and is based on your ratio of followers to following. When you hit this limit, we’ll tell you by showing an error message in your browser. You’ll need to wait until you have more followers in order to follow more users—basically, you can’t follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you.
Whether we agree with the way they run it or not, by using twitter we have to follow their rules. Most people don’t end up following way more than follow them but those of us who enter blog giveaways that require twitter follows, often end up with a high amount.
When you reach a daily or total limit and we show you an error message, you’ve hit a technical limit imposed to limit egregious behavior by spam accounts and to prevent strain on the site. These are just the technical limits for your account; in addition, you are prohibited from aggressive following behaviors. These behaviors may result in account suspension, regardless of your account’s technical ratio.
The key here is that you could get suspended for aggressive following behaviours .
We monitor all accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). You can read more about these below, but if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine
So you can unfollow some twitter users but you will also need to work on getting more twitter followers yourself. Just don’t unfollow hundreds at a time and don’t use any sort of website that will auto unfollow for you. There are sites such as http://www.friendorfollow.com or http://www.refollow.com where you can sort those you follow by the date they last tweeted. Start by weeding out those who haven’t tweeted in months or years. Unfollow any you don’t really want to follow anymore. I wouldn’t unfollow more than 100 and then I would wait a few days before unfollowing more.
As for getting more followers, this is easier if you are a blogger because you are providing content of interest to others and you can also participate in paid cash giveaways and such. I’m not really sure what to suggest for those who aren’t bloggers. Luckily there are tons of giveaways out there now so you can find ones that don’t require twitter follows. I would just weed out companies you only followed for the giveaway and don’t really care about (but not right after every giveaway, I mean when you need to weed followers), people who haven’t tweeted in a while and those whose tweets are of no interest to you (just other giveaways or spam tweets and whatnot.)
Does anyone have suggestions for Dianne?
Just one for today! If you want to submit a question, go here. (You can get 5 bonus entries into the may buffet giveaway for submitting a question – ends 5/15)
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