I’m reminded of a good friend of mine’s Networking talk where he proudly proclaims ‘you cannot know everything about your subject’ – the fact is Terry Cooper Chairman of 4Networking is right. For those of you that read my last blog about pruning your Twitter followers and keeping track of those who no longer follow, you will remember I recommended a third party programme called ‘manage flitter’ Within a week of that post the owners of that site have had to change their terms so that group unfollows are no longer allowed. There is a great video on their site that explains their new way of unfollowing accounts that are dormant or no longer following you.
Twitter have changed their terms to clarify this – so what do Twitter actually say about following and unfollowing accounts? Here is a summary of their rules :
What are the limits?
We don’t limit the number of followers you can have. However, we do monitor how aggressively users follow other users. We try to make sure that none of our limits restrain reasonable usage, and will not affect most Twitter users.
We monitor all accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). You can read more about these below, but if you don’t follow or un-follow hundreds of users in a single day, and you aren’t using automated methods of following users, you should be fine.
Please note that Twitter does not permit any automated or bulk following or un-following behavior. Please review our Automation Rules and Best Practices for more information on automating your account.
What is aggressive following?
Aggressive following is defined as indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. However, following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive.
What is aggressive follow churn?
If you decide to follow someone and then change your mind later, you can just visit the person’s profile page and un-follow them. Aggressive follow churn is when an account repeatedly follows and then un-follows a large number of users. This may be done to get lots of people to notice them, to circumvent a Twitter limit, or to change 
their follower-to-following ratio. These behaviors negatively impact the Twitter experience for other users, are common spam tactics, and may lead to account suspension.
The real thing to note about this is that as with all Social Media Platforms – They will suspend, delete, ban you if they feel they have cause to ! So care needs to be exercised – after all you can spend a lot of time and effort on these platforms to have that wiped out at the behest of an employee at Twitter HQ. Need any further advice ? Contact me for a chat