Twitter’s 5K Follow Barrier
What is it, what does it imply, and how do you break the logjam?
What is Twitter’s 5K Barrier?
New users on Twitter are generally anxious to get conversations fired up and tweeps following them. In their enthusiasm, they may follow other users at a furious pace. It’s not uncommon to see users following 4000 people or more when only a few hundred follow them. Rightly or wrongly, Twitter management doesn’t think that’s a healthy ratio of following to followers. When our erstwhile follow addict hits 5000 follows, Twitter will restrict the account from following more users until the account owner is followed by at least nine users for each ten it follows. That means that at 5,000 follows; you’ll probably need 4500 or more followers before you are free to follow more at will. An algorithm looking at how many users you follow per day sets the exact count. The problem is, how do you attract hundreds or thousands of new followers when you cannot return the favor and follow them? Therein lies the Catch 22 of the 5K limit.
What Does the 5K Limit Imply?
The first takeaway is that if Twitter tech staff believe the following/follower ratio is best kept near 1/1, they might impose other limits on lopsided accounts at levels other than 5K. Therefore, it’s probably a good idea to keep some balance, whatever your…
