Understand Your Niche

@bubbamike asked for a clarification on what I call Twitter ‘follow slots’, so for everyone’s benefit I decided to write this up as a blog post.

OK, so what is this thing called a ‘follow slot’? Before explaining, here’s some background:

• When your twitter account has fewer than 2000 followers, you can only follow 2000 other tweeple.
• After your twitter account has 2000 followers or more, you can only follow 10% more tweeple than are following you. For example, if 3000 are following you, you can only follow 3300, etc.

Obviously this makes each twitter account you follow occupy a ’slot’ in your allocation, given to you by Twitter. If you lose slots due to bugs in the twitter API implementation, this is a big deal, because it limits how fast you can grow your account by following real people. Think this can’t happen? Think again — today (04/19/2009) the ‘follow’ button on the Twitter website was messed up, so that it would not actually follow the twitter account you intended to, but still it would count each press as an actual follow. So the end result is that you’re losing a follow slot.

Again — why is losing follow slots like that bad? Because you cannot follow real people using these slots, they’re gone forever. You cannot recover them with unfollowing, because the follow didn’t ever really happen. Bad all around.

Be careful out there and watch your twitter follow slots like a hawk — they’re the most precious resource that Twitter is giving you, much more valuable than even the ability to tweet your message out any time you want.