I’ve recently been bumping up against the follower limits that hit when you start following 2,000 or more people on Twitter. As I understand it, once you’re following 2,000 or more, Twitter limits the maximum number of people you can follow to the number of people who follow you plus roughly 10 percent. So if you’re following 1,999 people and 1,800 people are following you — no problem. But once you’re following 2,000 people, you can’t follow any more because 1,800 plus 10 percent is equal to 1,980. To follow more, you’ve got to have more people following you. I don’t know if that 10 percent figure is precise, but it seems to be in the right place.
What that has meant is that some folks recently followed me that I couldn’t follow back, at least immediately, until my follower numbers were higher. So I started to work through this barrier by identifying Twitter accounts I could unfollow, freeing up spots for new followers. I also have been looking more selectively at the accounts following me before deciding to follow them or not.
I am basically inclined, out of courtesy and to open up the opportunities for meeting new people and having new interactions, to follow back anyone who follows me (I’m @marktzk on Twitter). But I am not following back everyone. Here are some of the reasons I might not be following you back (and if a lot of people are not following you back, chances are this applies to them, too).
1. You don’t tweet in English. Sorry, I’m monolingual. I’m not proud of it, and I would like someday to gain fluency in a second language, but it’s not happening right now. If I can’t understand what you’re saying, there’s not much point in following you.
2. There are a lot of affiliate links or ads in your tweet stream. I don’t mind you occasionally trying to make a buck through Twitter, but please do it occasionally, not frequently, and do it in a way that seems to fit in organically with whoever you are and whatever you tweet about it.
3. All your tweets are links to news and other web items. Sharing is good. Doing nothing but broadcasting stuff — basically hooking your Twitter account up to an RSS feed — is not so good. I’m looking for interaction and real human beings.
4. All your tweets are about you. Doing nothing but promoting your blog posts or nothing but making random comments about your life is just not that interesting. Those are both fine to include as part of your tweet stream, but I am looking for some evidence that if I follow you we might have a chance to interact at some point.
5. You don’t converse. Based on looking at your tweet stream, you never @reply or have conversations, you don’t retweet and you don’t seem to interact with others. All of your tweets are one way. Increasingly, I look to Twitter for interaction, sharing and at least the possibility of new relationships. In other words, if all I see is the behavior in numbers 2, 3 and 4 above.
6. You haven’t tweeted recently, or you only tweet rarely (once a week or less). Again, in my eyes this makes it less likely that we’ll have a chance to interact, so this is not good.
7. You’re account looks like it was set up to spam people. You don’t have a picture in your profile, there’s no link to someplace (a LinkedIn profile, at least?), or you have few or no tweets yet you’re following a lot of people. This makes you look like a spammer in the making, and I won’t go there.
On the other hand, the following things make more more likely to follow you.
1. You converse with people online. I’m looking for @replys, retweets and the like in your tweet stream. If I see them, no matter what else, I am much more likely to follow you back. Obviously, as you can tell from above, this is a big one for me.
2. You are (or could be) a part of my community offline. That might mean you live close to me (in the same state), or you work in the same industry (PR/marketing) or you have something in common with me that’s apparent in your bio or tweet stream (you’re a writer a or you share an alma mater with me, for example). Also, if I already know you in real life, than there’s a very good chance I’ll follow you.
3. You have retweeted or #FF’d me. Hey, I’m a sucker for flattery and attention, just like anybody else. So long as it doesn’t look you’re doing this purely for spammy reasons, I’m much more inclined to follow you if you do this. It’s just plain old reciprocity, one of the fundamental drivers of human social behavior.
4. You’ve replied to something I tweeted. Even if I wasn’t following you, you replied to something I tweeted. Maybe to comment on it, add something helpful or just say ‘thanks for tweeting that link.’ Whatever the case, this kind of personal communication lets me know that you’re into Twitter as a conversation platform, and that there’s a good possibility we’ll be able to interact.
I don’t have hard and fast rules about who I follow or don’t follow. But these are the factors, positive and minus, that usually go into my decision. How do you decide who to follow on Twitter? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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In no particular order, I'm a writer, MBA, ex-journalist, blogger, geek, strategic communications pro, father, struggling novelist 
