Days 31 - 36 Report

Last Wednesday (day 31) I changed my tactic: I started follow tweeters from "follow back" lists. On Wednesday (day 31) and Thursday (day 32) I followed 150 per day. As a result the total number of new followers started to increase. On Thursday I reached my next milestone of 2,000 followers. From that point Twitter limits the number of new followers. According to my simple calculations this limit is 10%. It means that if you have 2,001 followers - you could follow up to 2200 friends.

On my 33d day I decided to increase the number of tweeters to follow to the max. limit.

And from that point I followed new tweeters from the "follow back" lists till I was stopped by Twitter (technical) limit.

50% of my followers (1,545) followed me back. Thanks to all of you!

My updated follow back lists (fbl):

Followed back list 1 -500

Followed back list 501 -1,000

Followed back list 1,001 -1,500
Followed back list 1,501 -2,000

AND I DID IT IN 5 DAYS: FROM 2,000 FOLLOWERS TO 3,000!

What did I learn from this adventure:

1. The most effective way to choose tweeters to follow is:

a. chose the most recent "follow back" lists (from listorious.com)

b. chose active tweeters from the last hour

2. Do not forget to follow back. You must follow back within 72 hours, otherwise they will unfollow you. (See Feb,8 on the graph below: 89 unfollow me- I did not follow back exactly 72 hours)

3. Large number of tweeters use auto unfollow online tools. Before I started "massive" "follow back" action- I made a cleaned up: unfollow all tweeters that did not tweet at least three months (I unfollowed 90). And within 3 next days 71 unfollowed me. I checked those accounts - 60 of them were from that "dead" list. Amazing. There were accounts that tweeted last time in January 2009 and unfollowed me!