The first time I heard about Twitter was just three months ago. I was introduced to Facebook and YouTube at the same time. My thinking was that these sites were great places to interact with other like-minded people and I signed up for all three.

I immediately became active on all three sites and was learning as I went along. I had been advised that according to Twitter etiquette, it would be proper for me to follow back everyone that followed me. There was a free tool that was available that allowed me to do this, and to also automatically thank people for following me. I got everything set up and then started following people that I found interesting. Some of these people automatically followed me back, whereas others didn’t.

As the weeks went on, I paid very little attention to the numbers. In the top right-hand corner of the Twitter page there are three sets of numbers displayed. They are ‘following’, ‘followers’ and ‘updates’. I would go on the site and post a few times a day and each day I would add more people to follow, which meant that my ‘following’ number was steadily increasing. I didn’t pay much attention to how many people were actually following me back.

About a week ago I was in the process of adding more people that I wanted to follow, when my account seemed to freeze up and I was unable to follow anyone. I thought that Twitter was just having a technical glitch and forgot about it until the next day, when the very same thing happened. I sent a ‘tweet’ out asking others if they were experiencing the same problem. One person replied that I had received a “Twitter Slap”. I had heard of a “Google Slap” where Google punishes you for not adhering to their rules and regulations. Well, apparently this was much the same thing, but nowhere near as serious as a slap from Google.

Someone explained that as I was now following 2000 people, Twitter examines your ratio of following to followers and if you fall outside the parameters, then they shut you down and don’t allow you to follow anyone else, until you get your figures in order. So now I understood what the problem was, but how was I supposed to fix it?

I did my Google research and was amazed to find well over one hundred tools to enhance your Twitter experience. I was looking for something specifically that would help me reduce the number of people I was following. I wanted to do this in an informed way, so I was looking for something that would make the job easier. The first thing I needed was a list of the people who were not following me back.

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

www.friendorfollow.com…this site lists all the people who are not following you back; www.twitoria.com…this site lists all the people who have not posted for a while;

With the aid of these tools, it then became quite easy to choose the people I wanted to unfollow. By doing this I could have my account unfrozen and then continue to follow more targeted people. It did exactly as I had hoped.

If you are getting close to following 2000 people, it would be a good idea to start to take action now before you run into this same problem. I will periodically go into the website and do a little housecleaning. There are probably other Twitter slaps but this is the only one I have knowledge of right now.

If you are already on Twitter please follow me. If you are not on Twitter, then I suggest you go to twitter.com and sign up. It’s free….and then you can follow me. My twitter name is janshimano. I will follow you back.