Many Businesses are still falling into the trap of following back everyone who follows them, this can be a very risky strategy of building up and audience, as they may not all be interested in your brand.
However, having a large audience of people who are interested in the brand and who will talk about it can have many benefits, from increasing lead potential to good old fashioned brand lift.
Although, it is difficult to know the difference between followers who will engage with the brand and those who are ‘ghost’ followers and will not interact. But how would you find out?
There are many sites that can monitor data from twitter feeds such as www.justunfollow.com or www.followerwonk.com. These sites provide information on who is following/ unfollowing you on a daily basis. There can be many reasons as to why someone may unfollow you and these sites give you the ability to try and find out why.
You can look at the time at which they unfollowed you and try and see if there was a correlation to a post you may have tweeted at this time? Check their profile, perhaps they are no longer active on twitter? Maybe they’ve changed career and no longer need the information you’re providing? Perhaps you were tweeting too much and flooding their feed, or they may just want to change things up and keep their feed fresh. It is then down to you to decide what action you’re going to take to prevent this from happening too much.
Twitter does have limits on following to followers so unfortunately you can’t just follow loads of users and hope they follow back. Although twitter have kept the exact ratios a secret, it has become obvious that once a page has reached over 2000 followers you can’t follow more than 10% of that. So if you had 5000 followers, you couldn’t follow more than 5500 users or you’ll run the risk of having your account suspended. As well as this, if you use third party websites or apps to follow/unfollow users, this would also leave you at risk of your account being suspended, to avoid this from happening you shouldn’t let the website/app automate who you follow/unfollow, you should choose yourself as the suspension of accounts is automated based on patterns.