Why Is There A Limit For Tweeters On Twitter-Verse?
by Marsha Maung

I was asked this question and was left befuddled for a while.

While the world of internet gives many of us the much-longed-for opportunity to promote ourselves and network with others of like-mind, there ARE people who will manipulate the system. And THAT is why there is a limit on the number of people you’re allowed to follow on twitter.

What people do to get attention
The problem starts with this….the more people you follow, the more likely people will follow you. And you WANT people to follow you on twitter because that’s where you get to promote yourself, your products or services, your links and all the thoughts that you have to a while new universe of living beings (hopefully).

It was never meant to work like that but things get blown out of proportion and people take advantage of a simple updating system like twitter before you have the chance to say ‘tweet’.

Employing the WRONG techniques can be costly
Recently, I’ve had quite a number of people following me out of the blue. Being in this industry, it’s my job to check them out and when I click on the link to check out their twitter profile, twitter tells me that the account has been suspended for some nasty activities and asked me to scooter off to another site or page.

I started asking myself….why are these people following me and then their profile pages on twitter gets suspended?

This is what happened. No, let me rephrase that….there are some accounts are setup to follow people automatically for the sole purpose of enticing others to follow them. While there’s nothing wrong with doing that, some take it to the next level. After following a few hundred people which resulted in others following them back, they un-follow some of these people so that they can continue to bait ‘followers’ by first following them. So, in time, they would have had many followers under their twitter profile without busting the one-thousand followers limit.

Are you following me so far? Ha. Ha. I know, corny, but I couldn’t help myself. :-)

Twitter countering the problem
The good news is that Twitter’s caught on to this trend and have started suspending these manic following accounts. Good! The purpose of using twitter to connect with likeminded people or sharing stuff with friends and potential customers or business owners is lost if these errant tweeters are allowed to continue on with their ‘following’ and ‘un-following’ business.

Why are they using twitter this way
The way I see it, there are many, way too many, reasons why these tweeters are tweeting so regularly and mass following people. One, they want to make money out of their links. Some of them joined affiliate programs and each link that you click on, they get rewarded for it. Two, they are trying create an account with so many followers that people take one look at the number of followers that they have, people think of them as some sort of celeb. I mean, if you have thousands of followers, you’ve GOT TO BE a star of some sort, haven’t you?

The third is, by far, the most obvious and most proper one which is to get more people to their websites, blogs or get more subscribers to their mailing list. The only problem is that they’re using the viral concept which can be annoying and out-of-date.

Mass following and viral marketing
If you’ve not heard about it, let me tell you now that mass following and viral marketing is HOT….about ten years ago when I first started out. Now, it’s not. It’s all about personalizing your stuff, your links, revealing yourself, sharing WHOLE-HEARTEDLY and not selfishly.

Hidden agenda is no longer hidden agenda.

I hope that more people make use of twitter properly before it gets out of hand. The difference between the people behind twitter and facebook is that, twitter remains pretty much true to its original idea while facebook have evolved so much and have adopted so many different types of marketing and advertising that it’s not what it used to be anymore.

I am not saying that it’s not any good but all I am saying is that, at least, twitter stayed true to its original plan, evolving without morphing.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance web copywriter with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her blog for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef...and just about everything else under the sun.

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<b>Marsha Maung</b> is a Malaysian-based <a href="http://www.marshamaung.com" target="_blank">freelance writer</a> with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her <a href="http://www.marshamaung.blogspot.com" target="_blank">blog</a> for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef...and just about everything else under the sun.