Many people become frustrated when they hit the 2,000 following barrier in Twitter. It's a limit imposed by Twitter that few people know about when they start but most will run into. In short, it's an anti-spam device by Twitter. You can follow up to 1,000 people in a day, until you've followed 2,000 people. After 2,000, you can only follow 10% more people than are already following you.

A Case Study

Let's take the example of the campaign shown in the graph. Following 1,000 people a day is a recipe for a quick suspension. Twitter closely monitors brand new accounts for churning activity. You're much better off to follow about 300 people/day for the start of your campaign. So you sign up for the free version of our PMS Social Suite and enter a brand new account with a snazy new background, a good profile image, and a few well chosen tweets. Since the list we're using is so powerful, you're getting a follow back ratio of about 60%. In a mere 7 days you've followed 2,000 people and have 1,200 followers. That's very cool, so you upgrade to the paid version and put the campaign completely on autopilot.

What Happened?

Hey, who are these fly by night guys from Promote My Site? The next day the software didn't follow any more than the 2,000 you had followed the day before! Actually, that's not what happened at all. You've hit the 2,000 barrier with an out of balance account. With only 1,200 followers, you can't add anyone because of the 10% limit. The software will also only cull a maximum of 5% of the people you're following, which means at most you'll cull 100 people that aren't following you back. So if you cull 100 people, the software can only add back 100 people and perhaps only 60 of those will follow you back. So the going is going to be very slow for the next few weeks as you're able to gradually cull more people and follow more people each day.

The good news is that the software is relentless and accurate. It doesn't forget to perform your actions each day, although you might. Gradually, the account will come back into balance and you'll be able to follow more people. So the long flat area in the following line in the graph? The account is stuck at the 2K barrier until the followers are brought back into balance, and then the graph slopes sharply upwards because as you get past 2,000 you're able to increase the number of people that you follow each day.

By the end of 60 days you're at 16,000 followers! You had a tough few weeks as you slogged it out through the 2K barrier, but slow and steady wins the race. Now you're seeing real results.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Just like the instructions on the shampoo bottle, this is a good time to start over with a new account. When you're in the 15K range you'll be at the top of many directory listings for any niches you want to market to. Make sure you've signed up for directories such as Twellow. Guess how these are sorted? Yep, by follower count. The number of followers you have is social validation. By being near the top of the list you'll start to pick up followers in your niche because you're there. If you had tried to build a "quality" account by hand from scratch you'd be #2043 on the list and be seen as a mere peon. Now you're a player. If you've been tweeting on your topic you'll be rolling.

Now go ahead and create a new Twitter account and enter that information into the PMS Dashboard. Just click Edit, change the Twitter username and password, and click Update. You can switch your Twitter account as much as you desire -- whatever account is active when the process runs it what will get run. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than 1 account with 75K followers. Losing an account to a suspension won't hurt you very much, and you can have your accounts retweet the news from your main account.

The Benefits of Paid Vs Free

Most people hit the 2K barrier while using a free account. If they aren't culling their own non-mutuals, the system will appear to have stopped working. It hasn't stopped, it just can't do anything because once you've hit your limit of following 2,000 people you have to remove some of the people you're following in order to follow more. Don't fall to the temptation to mass unfollow the 1,000 people that aren't following you back in one shot. The 2K barrier is also the time that Twitter seems to pay attention to accounts to see if they're going to start churning. It's far safer to remove 50-100 people/day until you get over the hump. The fastest way over the hump is to have been removing those people along the way as you grew so that you arrive at the 2K barrier with a fairly balanced account. If you're using the paid service you won't run into that problem. You'll just see a flattening of the graph for about 10 days and then you'll be back to the steady growth you had become accustomed to. Go ahead and Sign up!

A number of people have noticed that the Lt_Draper Twitter account is now sporting the Who Goes There Owl. In other words, it was suspended by Twitter for "breaking the rules." We'll point out that we've never done anything that is against Twitter's Terms of Service, but according to their terms, "We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time." They can terminate your account any time they please -- you haven't paid them any money and your account exists solely at their whim. Do a Google search for "Twitter Account Suspended" and you'll see a lot of people singing the Twitter Owl Blues.

Should I Be Worried That Don's Account Was Suspended?

At first glance, that might be cause for concern. If a popular account like the lt_draper account can get suspended, what does that mean for you?

In reality, Don gave his account so that others could live. We've always counseled our customers that if they're going to live on the dangerous side and aggressively market on Twitter they need to cover their bets by having several accounts. Lt_Draper was just one of many accounts we run here and we push the envelope very hard to find out what the limits are. With this particular account, we violated just about every rule we outlined in our previous post Stupid Twitter Tricks to Get Your Account Suspended.

• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - This account was promoting articles about how to use automation on Twitter.
• Getting Blocked - This account was connected to an account on a forum where we took a rather unpopular stand with the rainbows, unicorns, and Skittles set. Some people were vocal about their intent to block and report as spam accounts that were taking the position that automation can be a useful marketing tool.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - We were pretty much testing the upper limits on what we could get away with on this account.
• Hitting the Top 1,000 - Twitter seems to take a close look at accounts that hit around 20,000 followers, which is enough to put you into the top 1,000. Lt_Draper had just broken 28,000 followers.

So it's not shocking that the account got suspended. It didn't impact our business at all because we've been following our own advice. We've burned accounts before and we expect to burn them again. We're playing at the edge so you don't have to.

What You Should Take Away

There are some critical lessons you can learn:

• Have more than 1 Account - Yes, we sound like a broken record, but you really shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Twitter can terminate your account for any reason or no reason at all. And they do.
• Stay Under the Radar - When you get an account to around 15K followers it's a good time to start a new account. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than a single account with 75K followers.
• Stay Quiet - If you tweet unpopular things or take unpopular positions there will be spiteful people that will block you. Twitter looks at blocking activity as a vote against your account. So if it's a business account, stay quiet. Avoid the urge to tweet things like "David Beckham kicks like a girl."
• Don't use more than 1 Service at Time - We've seen some accounts get suspended and when we look at the google cache of their profile page it becomes evident that they were using several "free" services to enhance their account. The problem with that approach is that you don't know which service got you banned. If you want to try several services, then build several accounts and experiment. But mixing services is just pushing the limits.
• Let The Software Work - We've pushed the limits with several accounts to find out where they are. We've set our software up to stay within about 50% of those limits. Don't turn around and follow more people on your own or mass unfollow while the software is running on your account. You're busting carefully determined limits and asking for trouble.
• Be Patient - It's easy to get frustrated, especially when you're running up against the 2,000 Follower Barrier. The software will get you through that hump, let it work. If you really can't wait the week to ten days it will take to get past the hump, then run 10 accounts up to 2,000. That's by far the quickest route to being able to contact 20,000 people with your tweets.

This is part of what you pay for with our service - our willingness to create dozens of accounts and, through trial and error, discover what works, what doesn't work, and what really doesn't work. We also recognize that twitter has changing standards for what is allowable, so we'll always have a pipeline of twitter accounts at different levels (pre 2K, etc) that we manipulate and test on so that you can just use our service and concentrate on your marketing messages.

It's not us!  Twitter is currently unable to process follow and unfollow requests. Or perhaps they'll show up after a while. As of this afternoon, if you click follow on someone's profile it will say you're following them, until you click refresh in which case it will say you're not following them.

So yeah, our software hasn't added any users for you today. At least it was a computer that found that out instead of you spending your time on it.

We'll be back when they're back.

I don't know how many times I've said this, but I'll say it again. Don't use Twitter automation on an account that you can't afford to lose. If it's an account that you're personally invested in you shouldn't play with it. Don't bet something you can't afford to lose.

With that said, getting suspended on Twitter is not as nearly as common as some people would have you believe. Out of a sample of 650K Twitter accounts we've researched, about 2,700 of them were suspended. That's 0.4% -- pretty good odds. Out of the hundreds of accounts we've run through our system, we've seen about 1% of them get suspended. That's double the average, but you'd expect a higher rate among people willing to push the envelope. Whenever we see an account get banned, we look at the profile in the google cache and see what they were doing. They were all pushing the envelope. We've started to detect some trends of the type of activity that will get you suspended:

• Young Accounts Get Closer Scrutiny - Accounts that are a few days old and immediately zoom to follow 1,000/day will flag themselves for a suspension. An account without any updates or the default icon also draws attention. If you're starting with a fresh account, it's important that a high percentage of the first people that you follow follow you back. It's also important that you grow slowly until you get over the 2,000 follower hump. Then you can gain speed.
• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - MLM, Email Marketing, Poker, Porn, etc combined with a young and aggressive profile will get the owl hovering.
• Automated Tweets - While it may seem like a cool trick to hook up a popular blog's (not your own) rss feed to TweetLater so that you've got automated tweets, Twitter seems to detect that you're only tweeting links, and duplicate ones at that. Likewise automatically tweeting the links from another social network such as all your Diggs or Stumbles and no other content will get their attention.
• Too Many @Replies or DMs - If you blast a marketing message via @reply or direct messages you'll attract attention. Yes, you can send up to 1,000 messages a day. Just don't make it a mass mailing.
• Getting Blocked - This is perhaps the number one indicator to Twitter of an abusive account. If people are blocking you and enough people do it they will take a look at you.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - Don't try the cheap shot of following someone and then unfollowing them an hour later. That strategy used to work -- enough people were using services that automatically followed people back and those had enough of a lag that you could fool them into a one-way follow. But it's pretty clear that Twitter is looking for that behavior. To be safe, don't unfollow someone for at least 72 hours after you've followed them. And don't unfollow more than 5% of your total in any one day.

If you're using the PMS Social Suite you won't run into problems of following too quickly or churning. We enforce carefully formulated ratios on our automated activity to stay within the limits. If one of our users gets blocked by someone, no other of our users will try to follow them. All of the accounts in the system get the benefit of data gained from all the other accounts. Keep tracking of all that and making all those calculations by hand is a tall order, so automation is key.

What you do on your own time is up to you. But again, you're pushing the envelope by using automation. If you're a customer you've seen the giant gains you can get. But it's not risk free. So don't risk something you can't afford to lose. And don't push it even further by engaging in those other behaviors unless you're ok with playing the game of constantly getting your accounts suspended.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that your Twittering needs to be genuine. Automation is great for making the first contact, but that's not a license to spam. You should be using this strategy to make contact with more people. You still need to move them into other touch points in your sales system such as your blog, newsletters, product offers, etc. That doesn't mean build up a huge list of followers and then start tweeting only affiliate links at them. You've got to build up credibility. Throw in some useful information and links to other sources. You'll find that people are a lot more likely to click on the links you need them to.

We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"

A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.

There's an easy solution to this: just go to your Dashboard, click Edit, then click Delete. The next day you'll get an automated message reminding you that you need to enter data if you want the service to work, and then you'll be done. Any record we have of your Twitter information will be gone and you won't end up in the next processing batch.

You Might Not Be Thinking About This Right

We've said several times that you shouldn't use this service for your primary, personal account. Aside from the danger that you could get banned (a small risk, but it can happen and you've been warned), it also means that your personal timeline will see a huge influx of followers. If you don't want to see that, then just create a separate business account and run that through the system. Don't mix business and pleasure.

It also comes down to diversifying your social portfolio. Do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket? If you're targeting five different niches, then you should have five different Twitter accounts -- at least!

Twitter automation is really hot right now. The strategy is working quite well. Will it work forever? Probably not. The only thing constant in Internet Marketing is change. You're not paying any money to Twitter, which means they can do pretty much whatever they want and you don't have recourse. Let's say things change dramatically in six months. If you've been following a particular strategy on a single account and that account becomes worthless, you've lost everything. But if you've got several accounts with different strategies, it's like riding out a downturn in the market with a diversified portfolio. It just doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to put all your bets on a single account.

How to Keep Track of it All

There are lots of ways to deal with a flood of data in your twitter stream. If you're using the Twitter html interface, you're in a horse and buggy while being passed in the autobahn. It's quaint, but ultimately dangerous.

Our personal preference for a client is Tweetdeck. There are others, that's just the first one we came across that really worked well. If you've got a huge number of people you're following but are only interested in a few key areas, just create a real time search on those keywords. Tweetdeck will display tweets in a separate column that match that search. Now you're right on top of things in real time. You can have a huge net and personal interaction with the key prospects you're looking for.

Let's say there is a small group of people that you really want to follow. You can create a group and display just tweets from that group in a column.

Your RSS reader is also a great way to keep track of tweets in near real time. Look at a Twitter profile page. Down at the bottom of the right sidebar you'll see an rss feed for that user, such as Lt_Draper's RSS feed. You can load that into your rss reader and you'll see the tweets from that user arrive.

Or perhaps you'd like to follow a group of people with RSS. Just create a Yahoo Pipe like Don and Oliver's RSS Feeds. That pipe shows how simple it is to create a mashup of multiple RSS feeds. Click "Edit Source" and you can see how easy it was to build.

You Can Still Be Personal and Popular

There seems to be the misconception among many Internet Marketers that you have to make a choice between having a lot of followers and having quality followers. There's a group of people that think hand picked, delicately crafted follower lists have higher quality than huge lists gained through automation.

Anybody would agree that specifically targeted leads are better than shotgun leads in their eventual quality. But there doesn't have to be a choice between the strategies. Why can't you use automation to build up a large following while you're using manual methods to specifically target people? Automating just means that you have more time for higher value activities. I'll take a list of 30,000 followers, about 1,000 of which were carefully targeted, over a list of 1,000 carefully targeted followers any day.

The benefit to that approach is social proof. If you've got a larger following, the people you follow will see you as more credible than the guy with 60 followers. If you're concerned that people will be put off by your huge following, then run an account that is only handcrafted leads and a few others that are automated.

Find out for yourself. Experiment, measure, and repeat until you find what works. Just don't let the preconceptions you've formed without experience or data color what your'e seeing.

Oh yeah, there's a free trial available: PMS Social Suite. You didn't really expect me to forget to plug what we're selling?