I have just had to learn how to deal with the mathematics of Twitter follower counts. For most casual Twitter users, this is not something they will ever have to deal with. But business users who intend to use Twitter to get their marketing message to as many people as possible must learn how to overcome the cap Twitter places on the number of people they can follow.
Here is the deal: To prevent spam use, Twitter limits the number of people you can follow to the greater of 2,000 or 110% of the number of people who follow you.
To clarify, consider the following scenarios:
Your follower count: 1,600. In this situation, the maximum number of people you can follow is 2,000 (the greater of 2,000 or 1,760, which is 110% of the follower count).
Your follower count: 3,000. In this situation, the maximum number of people you can follow is 3,300 (110% of the number of people who follow you).
The limit on the number of people you can follow presents a problem for most people because of the very way Twitter is used. In general, you get Twitter followers by following other Twitter users, under the assumption that many of them will follow you in return. But relying on this strategy to build your follower count will usually mean that the count of the number of people who follow you is somewhat less than the number of people you follow. If this situation continues, you will bump up against your limit at or just past the 2,000 mark.
So how do you correct this? There are two basic ways. One is to unfollow all Twitter users who do not follow you back. This should give you a follower to followee ratio of about 1:1, which will allow you to continue building your list, even though you will only be able to add a small number of users before you have to repeat the process of removing users.
The other way is simply to have more people following you than you follow in return. You could do this by advertising your Twitter page, using SEO to make sure your page ranks in search engines, or by just being someone so well known that people follow you by default. There are not too many people who fall into the latter category, but if you can establish yourself as a premier expert in your industry, then you might qualify.
So hopefully now you have a better understanding of the math of the Twitter follower count. The 2,000 user maximum adds some difficulty to building a large follower count, but it can be overcome with some creative marketing.
