I was introduced to Twitter about three months ago along with many other Web 2.0 sites.  I decided to sign up as it looked like a great place to interact with others and meet people with similar interests as myself.  I signed up for Facebook and YouTube at the same time.

I started to be active on all three sites and was learning as I went along.  As far as Twitter was concerned, I was told that it was proper etiquette to follow back everyone that followed me.  There was a tool available where you could automatically follow those following you and also post a tweet to them thanking them for following you.  I set this up and started following people that I thought were interesting.  Some of those people also were using this particular tool so they automatically followed me back.  However, a number of people did not have the tool and for whatever reason decided not to follow me back.

I paid very little attention to the numbers as the weeks went on.  There are three sets of numbers at the top right-hand corner of the home Twitter page.  It lists “followers”, “following” and “updates”.  I was being fairly active on the site and was posting a few times a day.  Each day I would add a few more people to follow so my “following” number was increasing.  I didn’t pay too much attention to how many people were following me back.

So just about a week ago I was adding more people that I wanted to follow when one of the follow requests would not activate. I thought that Twitter was having a technical problem so left it for a while.  However, when I tried again, the same thing happened.  I had no idea what was going on.  I was still able to send out “tweets” (twitter messages) so I asked if this was happening to anyone else.  I received a reply that I had received a “Twitter Slap”.  Perhaps you have heard of the very common “Google Slap” where Google punishes you for not adhering to their rules and regulations.  Well, this is much the same thing but obviously not anywhere near as serious.

It was explained to me that I was now following 2000 people but only 1700 were following me.  Twitter has a rule that once you reach 2000 people you have to have a certain number of people following you back, otherwise they freeze you from continuing to follow others.  So now I knew what my problem was….but how was I going to resolve it.

I did a little research and was amazed to find literally over one hundred different tools that you could use to enhance your Twitter experience.  I was searching for something that would help me reduce the number of people I was following.  I didn’t just want to go in and arbitrarily unfollow others, so I was looking for something that would make the job easier.  For one thing I needed to know the people that were not following me back.

Here are the two tools that I highly recommend to get the job done.

1. friendorfollow.com –  this will actually list all the people who are not following you back;
2. twitoria.com –   this will list all the people you are following who have not posted for a while;

It then became an easy task to choose the people I wanted to unfollow so that I could free up my ability to follow others again.  It has worked like a charm.

For those of you who are getting close to following 2000 people, it would be a good idea to take some action now so that you don’t run into this difficulty.  I am sure there are other slaps but as of now, I don’t know what they are or when they will occur.