What Are the Differences Between Following & Followers on Twitter?
There's a lot of talk about following and followers in the Twitter (twitter.com) community. Those just getting started with Twitter will quickly notice the statistics on their profile pages labeled "Following" and "Followers." Before you can truly leverage the power of Twitter, you must know the basics such as the difference between following and followers. The concept of one-way following or follower connections is unique to Twitter but is quite easy to understand.
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Following
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Following is the action a user takes to connect with another user or brand on Twitter. Once a user is following someone, he has subscribed to that person's or brand's status updates and the updates will appear in the user's time line. The time line is a way to view all status updates, from everyone the user is following, in chronological order. By following a person or brand, the user also gives that person or brand the ability to contact him by sending private Tweets, known as direct messages. To follow a person's or brand's page, the user must navigate to the page and press the green "Follow" button.
Followers
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Anyone who has subscribed to a user's status updates is known as a follower of that user. Likewise, when a user follows someone's page, he is considered a follower of that page. By clicking on the "Followers" link his profile page, a user can see everyone who is following him. Users can also see another person's or brand's followers by clicking the "Followers" link on that person's or brand's page.
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Unfollowing
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At any point, a user may decide that a page he is following is irrelevant, boring, offensive and decide to stop following that person or brand. Unfollowing a page is common and is done by navigating to the page and using the cursor to hover over the "Following" button. Once the cursor is in place a red "Unfollow" button will appear. Once the "Unfollow" button is clicked, that page's status updates is removed from the user's timeline.
Following Limits
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Twitter doesn't have following limits, per se, but they do "monitor how aggressively users follow other users," according to their Following Rules and Best Practices page. Every user is allowed to follow 2,000 people. Beyond the 2,000 following mark, the number of people a user can follow is based on a following to follower ratio. According to Twitter, this ratio is different for every user and accounts are monitored on a case-by-case basis. The following limits are in place to deter users from spamming and to keep the Twitter network free of internal server strain that leads to down-time and error pages. For users using Twitter in an appropriate manner (e.g. not spamming others), the following limits are unlikely to be reached. Those who do reach the limit will need to unfollow pages or receive more follows before they can follow others.
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