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 follower count might be. Secondly, it means it’s a bad idea to max out follows without ensuring the people you follow return the favor. I use UnfollowSpy to ensure that, after a reasonable wait, those I’ve followed follow me back, unfollowing those who do not. The app also informs you of the attempted free riders who follow you only to unfollow as soon as you follow them back, a pet peeve of mine. There are other apps with similar functions, and a search will let you evaluate which is best for you.
How Does One Break the 5K Logjam? You need more followers, but you get them by unfollowing non-followers.
You can use a smartphone, but it’s much easier to do on a laptop or desktop, as the desktop mode offers a more robust toolkit. Let’s get started; navigate to your profile. Click the Following Tab and scroll down to the bottom of the list. Holding the down arrow key will accomplish that. It may seem like an eternity, but I’ve scrolled to the bottom of my 23K plus Following Tab multiple times. You can do it. As you scroll back up, find and unfollow your early follows who never reciprocated. That will give you a slug of follows to dole out to new users who follow you. If you need thousands of new followers to achieve 1/1, consider tweeting a list of top users who post content you are interested in, including your @handle on the list. Make a pinned tweet of it. Drive those followers in. You’ll soon leave that 5K barrier in shambles.
